Rahul Panat is an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and his Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). After his Ph.D., Panat worked at Intel Corporation, Chandler, AZ, for a decade in the area of microprocessor manufacturing research and development (2004-2014).

His work at Intel included research on next generation high density interconnects, thinning of Si, 3-D packaging, and lead-free and halogen-free ICs. He won several awards for his work at Intel, including an award for developing manufacturing processes for the world's first fully green IC chip in 2007. He moved to academics in 2014 and joined the Washington State University, Pullman, before moving to Carnegie Mellon in 2017.

At Carnegie Mellon, Panat works on micro-scale additive manufacturing and its applications to biomedical devices and energy materials. Specifically, his group works on high performance biosensors, biomonitoring devices, and brain-computer interfaces. The process development side focuses on using fundamentals of mechanics to enable new manufacturing processes that lead to structures with enhanced functionality.

The application side focuses on bringing the advances in microfabrication to the field of biomedical engineering in order to create devices that can benefit the public health. He recently developed the fastest known COVID-19 antibody test with high sensitivity due to a unique, 3D printing technology and an electrochemical reaction.