Sunitha received her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from SVUCE, India. She earned her Ph.D. degree in May of 2004 from the Mechanical Engineering Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute working in the field of computational fluid dynamics under the guidance of Professors Kenneth E. Jansen and Richard T. Lahey. During her doctoral research, she made contributions toward the development of novel computational techniques for the simulation of single and multi-fluid incompressible/compressible flows using finite element methods. She applied level set method to study arterial blood flows, dynamics of single and multiple bubbles, interfacial instabilities, and non-linear dynamics of free surface flows and cavitation.

Sunitha joined the Center for Engineering in Medicine in June of 2004. Her work involves the use of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) to manipulate and analyze cells for therapeutic and diagnostic purposes. One of the major goals of her research at the CEM is to develop a microdevice to detect circulating tumor cells. Detection of cancer cells in the peripheral blood of patients is a potential indicator for diagnosis and prognosis in oncology.

She is developing a novel, point-of-care microfluidic platform capable of selective separation of rare circulating epithelial cells from the peripheral blood of cancer patents. Using this technology, she demonstrated the capture of circulating epithelial cells from various adenocarcinomas such as lung, prostate, colon and pancreas. This technological advance has important clinical implications and ultimately could be applied as a point-of-care high-throughput diagnostic device as well as being used for longitudinal follow-up of cancer patients for tailored targeted therapy. She is also applying computational tools to understand the cell hydrodynamics at micro scales to design and optimize microfluidic devices. Her major research interests are developing engineering tools for clinical care, specifically cancer diagnosis, prognosis and targeted therapy.