Gerard L. Coté is the recipient of the 2020 Sigma Xi Walston Chubb Award for Innovation. The award honors and promotes creativity in science and engineering. It carries a $4,000 honorarium and an invitation to give the Walston Chubb Award Lecture at Sigma Xi's Annual Meeting and Student Research Conference.
He is the Texas A&M Regents Professor, director of the Center for Remote Health Technologies and Systems, director of the NSF PATHS-UP ERC, and holder of the James J. Cain Professor I in Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University.
Coté receives the award for his leadership in the development of biomedical optical systems for an array of medical applications with clinical impact.
His research focuses on biomedical sensing for diagnostic and monitoring applications. Specifically, he develops innovative hand-held and wearable point-of-care technologies and systems for a variety of chronic and infectious disease applications using optics, electronics, microfluidics, paper fluidics, nanoparticles, and assays.
He has coauthored over 350 publications, proceedings, and abstracts, leading to him being named Fellow of four societies (IEEE, SPIE, BMES, and AIMBE). Beyond fundamental research, Dr. Coté performs translational research and is an entrepreneur. He holds several U.S. patents, works with large and small companies, and has co-founded three medical device companies namely; BioTex, BasePair BioTechnologies, and Visualase (acquired by Medtronic in 2014). He is a Sigma Xi member.