Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering | About JSNN | Our People | Sam Oliveira, Ph.D.

Sam Oliveira, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor

Nanoengineering

Email Address: smdoliveira@ncat.edu

Phone: 336.285.2785

Office: 209-C

Curriculum Vitae

About

Sam is an Assistant Professor of Nanoengineering at the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering (JSNN) at North Carolina A&T State University. He leads the Oliveira Lab, which works at the interface of microfluidics, synthetic biology, bioengineering, live-cell imaging, computational modeling, and AI-guided biological discovery.

The Oliveira Lab studies how the physical, chemical, and biological environment shapes microbial communication, decision-making, and collective behavior. The group is especially interested in how cells sense and respond to spatial gradients, confinement, flow, nutrient availability, stress, neighboring species, and host-like microenvironments. By recreating these conditions in microfluidic and millifluidic systems, the lab investigates how individual cell behaviors scale into community-level outcomes such as biofilm formation, cooperation, competition, persistence, and functional specialization.

Since joining JSNN, Sam has built a high-quality, externally funded research program supported by agencies and programs including NSF, DARPA, and the NC Collaboratory. The lab’s current roadmap includes NSF-supported microfluidic and AI-guided discovery platforms for microbial-community screening; DARPA-supported engineered and beneficial biofilm systems; NC Collaboratory-supported host-microbe and immune microenvironment models; and DARPA-supported digital twins and predictive models that integrate experiments, imaging, and computation. Sam is active in the synthetic biology and biotechnology communities through seminars, workshops, EBRC, SynBioBr, iGEM-related activities, SynBioBeta, and community-facing lab events. He also co-founded Doroth, an AgTech company focused on microfluidic, molecular, and automation technologies for crop-field monitoring in Brazil.

Selected Publications

  • S.M.D. Oliveira and D. Densmore (2022) Hardware, Software, Wetware, Co-Design for Synthetic Biology. BioDesign Research. 2022(9794510), 15. DOI: 10.34133/2022/9794510
  • T.S. Jones, S.M.D. Oliveira, C.J. Myers, C.A. Voigt, and D. Densmore (2022) Genetic Circuit Design Automation with Cello 2.0. Nature Protocols. 17: 1097–1113. DOI: 10.1038/s41596-021-00675-2
  • S.M.D. Oliveira, N.S.M. Goncalves, L. Martins, R. Neeli-Venkata, J. Reyelt, J.M. Fonseca, J. Lloyd-Price, H. Kranz, and A.S. Ribeiro (2019) Chromosome and plasmid-borne pLacO3O1 promoters differ in sensitivity to critically low temperatures. Scientific Reports, 9:4486. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-39618-z
  • S.M.D. Oliveira, A. Häkkinen, J. Lloyd-Price, H. Tran, V. Kandavalli, and A.S. Ribeiro (2017) Temperature-Dependent Model of Multi-Step Transcription Initiation in Escherichia coli Based on Live Single-Cell Measurements. PLoS Computational Biology, 12(10): e1005174. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005174
  • S.M.D. Oliveira et al. (2016) Increased cytoplasm viscosity hampers aggregate polar segregation in Escherichia coli. Molecular Microbiology, 99(4):686-699. DOI: 10.1111/mmi.13257
  • S.M.D. Oliveira, J.G. Chandraseelan, A. Häkkinen, N.S.M. Goncalves, O. Yli-Harja, S. Startceva, and A.S. Ribeiro (2015) Single-cell kinetics of the Repressilator when inserted into a single-copy plasmid. Molecular Biosystems, 11:1939-1945. DOI: 10.1039/C5MB00012B
  • J. Mäkelä, M. Kandhavelu, S.M.D. Oliveira, J.G. Chandraseelan, J. Lloyd-Price, J. Peltonen, O. Yli-Harja, and A.S. Ribeiro (2013) In vivo single-molecule kinetics of activation and subsequent activity of the arabinose promoter. Nucleic Acids Research, 5:1-9. DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkt350

Honors & Awards

  • DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), PI: Samuel Oliveira, North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, USA.
  • NC Collaboratory Research Award, PI: Samuel Oliveira, North Carolina A&T State University, Greensboro, USA.
  • National Science Foundation, Collaborative Research (#2211040), Technical Leader, Boston-Greensboro, USA.
  • NCAT Excellence in Research Award 2024 – Interdisciplinary Team. NCAT Award. Authors: Reza Zadegan, Salil Desai, Shyam Aravamudhan, and S.M.D. Oliveira. Greensboro, USA.
  • PIPE FASE-2 and PIPE-INVEST FAPESP Awards, Startup Doroth, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
  • Best Ph.D. Thesis Award, Functionality of Genetic Circuits at Fluctuating Temperatures, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland.

Classes Taught

NANO 706 – Systems and Computational Biology (Fall)

NANO 853 – Microfluidics and Biological Applications (Spring)

Research Interests

Bioengineering and nanobioengineering: microbial communication, synthetic microbial communities, beneficial and engineered biofilms, host-microbe and immune microenvironment models; Microfluidics and automation: artificial microenvironments, live-cell imaging platforms, rapid prototyping, and lab automation; Computation and AI: spatiotemporal data analysis, machine learning, digital twins, and predictive models for microbial community behavior.

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