Ken Suslick, PhD

Ken Suslick is the Marvin T. Schmidt Professor of Chemistry Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and CEO of Iridescent Sensors Inc.

Ken received his B.S. from Caltech in 1974 and his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1978 while holding a Hertz Foundation Fellowship (dissertation title: Synthetic Analogs of Myoglobin and Hemoglobin).

Suslick has been at Urbana-Champaign for 45 years, where he taught inorganic, materials, and analytical chemistry. His research projects covered three major areas: the chemical and physical effects of ultrasound (which included nano-materials synthesis and sonoluminescence), the mechanochemistry of inorganic solids (specifically shock wave energy dissipation by MOFs, i.e., metal-organic framework solids) and chemical sensing (focused on the optoelectronic nose and the use of colorimetric sensor arrays for the detection of toxic gases). He has published more than 500 scientific publications with more than 66,500 citations (h-index, 131), including 71 patents issued and pending.

In addition to his academic research, Professor Suslick has had significant entrepreneurial experience. He was the lead consultant for Molecular Biosystems Inc. and part of the team that commercialized the first echo contrast agent for medical sonography, Albunex™, which became Optison™ by GE Healthcare. In addition, he was the founding consultant for VivoRx Pharmaceuticals and co-inventor of one of the first FDA-approved nanopharmacueticals, Abraxane™ (serum albumin microspheres with a paclitaxel core), which is the predominant current delivery system for taxol chemotherapy for breast cancer; VivoRx became Abraxis Bioscience, which was acquired by Celgene for $2.9 billion. Most recently, Suslick invented, developed, and commercialized the “optoelectronic nose”, a simple but highly effective technology for the identification and quantification of gas analytes. He cofounded Specific Diagnostics Inc. in Silicon Valley that developed a successful device for rapid AST (antibiotic susceptibility testing for sepsis diagnosis) approved in the E.U. and FDA fast tracked for approval Fall, 2023. The large French biotech firm BioMérieux purchased Specific Diagnostics in May 2022 for $430M. For his 70th birthday, at the end of 2022, Ken started a new company, Iridescent Sensors which is focused on handheld toxic gas sensors for first responders.