James Friend leads the Medically Advanced Devices Laboratory in the Center for Medical Devices at the University of California, San Diego, as a professor in both the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Jacobs School of Engineering and the Department of Surgery, School of Medicine. His research interests are principally in exploring and exploiting micro/nano acoustofluidics for biomedical applications. He currently supervises a team of 7 PhD students and 2 post-doctoral staff, has over 260 peer-reviewed research publications (H-factor = 43) and 28 patents in process or granted, completed 33 postgraduate students and supervised 19 postdoctoral staff, and been awarded over $25 million in competitive grant-based research funding. He most recently co-founded Arna Systems, a diagnostics company. Among other awards, he is a fellow of the IEEE and awarded the IEEE Carl Hellmuth Hertz Ultrasonics Award from the IEEE in 2015.