Luqia Hou

Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway, NJ, USA (United States), Stanford University

Papers

Total Citations

H-Index

About

Luqia Hou is a biomedical researcher whose work bridges stem cell biology and cardiac bioengineering, with a focus on developing tools to study and treat cardiovascular disease. Her key research areas include human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) differentiation, endothelial cell therapy for peripheral arterial disease (PAD), and high-throughput electrophysiological measurement systems. Hou’s major contributions include pioneering extracellular matrix-mediated protocols for differentiating iPSCs into functional endothelial cells, offering a promising cell source for vascular regeneration in PAD patients. She also led the development of a fully-automated, low-cost cardiac monolayer optical mapping robot, a scalable system that enables high-throughput measurement of action potentials and intracellular calcium dynamics—critical for drug screening and disease modeling. While her most-cited papers each hold 3 citations, their impact lies in addressing unmet needs in translational medicine: one targets the 8 million Americans affected by PAD, and the other aims to democratize cardiac electrophysiology research through automation and cost reduction. Hou’s work exemplifies how engineering and stem cell science can converge to accelerate therapeutic discovery.