Rising Professional Achievement Award
Henry Tse M.S. ’11, Ph.D. ’12

Henry Tse is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Cytovale, a medical diagnostics company spun out of research at UCLA. As a bioengineering doctoral student, Tse worked in the lab of then-assistant professor Dino Di Carlo, where he researched the biophysical properties of cells. In particular, he focused on deformability cytometry, examining the behavior of cells as they are squeezed through microchannels.

In 2013, just one year after earning his Ph.D., Tse returned to the Bay Area and launched Cytovale, scaling up the research he started at UCLA to develop early-detection technologies for critical applications in clinical diagnostics. Over the last decade, he led the Cytovale team in developing the microfluidics, instrumentation and algorithms to create a low-cost clinical diagnostic device for early detection of sepsis — the number one cause of death in hospitals. In January 2023, the company received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for the first-of-its-kind sepsis diagnostic tool IntelliSep. The device can test for sepsis based on the degree to which cells deform and can provide results in under 10 minutes from a standard blood draw. IntelliSep is now used in hospitals around the country.