Adam Gormley, Ph.D. – Rutgers University

Building the Future of Drug Delivery with Self-Driving Labs

Can you tell us a bit about your background and research focus?

I’m an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Rutgers University. I earned my undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Lehigh University, followed by a Ph.D. in bioengineering at the University of Utah, where I focused on drug delivery, polymer materials, and nanoparticles. I then completed postdoctoral fellowships at Imperial College London and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, working on nanomaterial self-assembly, polymer chemistry and drug delivery. I started the Gormley lab at Rutgers University in 2017. My research today centers on bioinspired nanomaterials and polymers for drug delivery.

Why did you decide to apply bioinspired and self-assembling nanomaterials to drug delivery?

My background is in fundamental engineering, but biology is amazing and has sophisticated tools which have given rise to incredible diversity and beautiful structures, particularly in proteins. I want to use synthetic technologies and engineering tools and approaches to reproduce and engineer materials that mimic what biology can do naturally. Applying this mentality to drug delivery was a natural fit for me because it combines everything I’m interested in into a real-world application.

What’s unique about your lab at Rutgers?

We’re developing a fully autonomous, self-driving lab. By integrating automation, robotics, and machine learning, we’re creating systems that can design, execute, and analyze experiments with minimal human input. It’s a highly interdisciplinary effort involving chemistry, biophysics, biology, programming, and AI. I spend a lot of time educating, training, and mentoring undergraduate and graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows. To integrate all of these tools together, we need to teach and orienting people who are unfamiliar with one or more of those concepts. It’s a challenging task, but exciting.

How does Waters | Wyatt fit into your workflow?

The DynaPro^™ Plate Reader platform has been a cornerstone of our lab. It allows us to run dynamic light scattering (DLS) experiments in a high-throughput plate format, which is essential for our combinatorial studies. We use it daily and it has been an absolute workhorse. We also use the miniDAWN^™ for molecular weight and size determination, especially with proteins. It’s highly reliable when we have validated systems and known dn/dc values.

What features of the DynaPro Plate Reader make it so valuable to your team?

Plate-based DLS is a must-have when doing high throughput experimentation. Access to raw autocorrelation data has been critical for us, too. We don’t just want a single hydrodynamic radius value—we need the full dataset to train our machine learning models. Wyatt’s support team has been extremely responsive and important to us as well. They care about customers and helping us solve problems. The Plate Reader API was key to us as well because it enabled us to integrate the instrument into our automated workflows, which was a game-changer.

What’s next for your lab?

We’re building a web interface that allows remote users to design experiments and interact with our automation. The goal is to democratize access to advanced lab tools—what we call “cloud laboratories.” We want to empower scientists everywhere, regardless of location or resources. We also want to free up scientists from the physical labor of doing experiments so they can be creative and do what humans are good at–asking the right questions and thinking.