Event
BIOE Seminar: Javier Atencia
Friday, February 6, 2026
9:00 a.m.
A. James Clark Hall, Room #2121
Ian White
ianwhite@umd.edu
Javier Atencia
Founder & CEO
PathOtrak Inc.
Abstract
Pathotrak started as a side project while I was a researcher at NIST and became a company through customer discovery, non-dilutive support (including NSF I-Corps), and—eventually—the decision to leave a stable job and commit full-time. In this talk I’ll share what changed as the work moved from “interesting technology” to “something customers will adopt,” including why the original patent mattered far less than the capabilities we had to build afterward: product decisions, new IP, execution under real constraints, and building the right team.
Bio
Javier Atencia, PhD, is the Founder and CEO of Pathotrak, a food-safety diagnostics company translating microfluidics and advanced sample preparation into deployable pathogen testing workflows. He previously spent nearly 15 years as a Research Scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where he worked on microfluidic systems for measurement and control of complex biological processes.
Dr. Atencia began Pathotrak as a side project and advanced it through early customer discovery and non-dilutive support, including NSF I-Corps. His work now focuses on bridging the gap between research prototypes and tools that perform reliably in real testing environments. He is an inventor on multiple issued and pending patents spanning microfluidic devices, sample preparation, and pathogen concentration methods, and received the University of Maryland’s Best Invention of the Year in Life Sciences award (2015) for microfluidics-related work.
