Dr. Van Epps has broad multidisciplinary background in the fields of bio/chemical engineering, molecular biology, and medicine.  He is a board certified Emergency Physician who sees patients within the Michigan Medicine Adult Emergency Department and Emergency Critical Care Center.  Since coming to the University of Michigan, his research interests have focused life-threatening infections with particular emphasis on infections of implanted medical devices and novel technologies to prevent bacterial adhesion, colonization, and infection of these devices.  He has developed and optimized several assays and tools to evaluate bacterial adhesion, characterize new materials, evaluate bacteria response to nanomaterial suspensions and substrates, and evaluate pacification of those materials.  Using these tools, he has developed and determined the mechanism of action of several novel antimicrobial nanomaterials.  In addition, he is actively developing novel assays for rapid, culture-free detection and antibiotic susceptibility of bacteria in whole blood.  His previous projects successfully combined engineering (both analysis and design) with traditional biological experiments to determine the mechanism for location specific atherosclerotic lesion development using in vitro, ex vivo, and large animal models.