Daniel Sop is a Biomedical Engineering PhD Candidate with over 15 years of technical and
computational experience and over 10 years of data management experience in healthcare and
research. He earned a Bachelors of Science from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia,
and a Masters of Science in Biomedical Engineering from Virginia Commonwealth University in
Richmond, Virginia. Currently, he is completing his doctoral degree in Biomedical Engineering
with a focus on objective pain measurement at Virginia Commonwealth University. In his
current role at Virginia Commonwealth University he serves as the Senior Clinical Research
Analyst for several government and privately-funded grants focused on sickle cell disease
within the Division of General Internal Medicine. Mr. Sop was one of nine nationally selected
students to attend and complete the DC I-Corps program in 2016. This program is designed to
expedite technology transfer and commercialization from regional universities and federal labs,
and jumpstart technology-based startups in the Washington, DC region. Through his work at
VCU, Mr Sop has developed mobile-based applications for pain monitoring in sickle cell
patients. This is an ongoing project through which he aims to study and report patterns of pain
and opioids utilization amongst sickle cell patients or patients suffering of chronic non-cancer
pain. Mr. Sop was also recently selected as a fellow by the Pittsburgh Intensive Training in
Hematology Research (PITHR), an NIH research education program that supports research
education activities aiming to complement and/or enhance the training of a workforce to meet
the nation’s biomedical, behavioral and clinical research needs while enhancing the diversity of
the biomedical, behavioral and clinical research workforce. Through his work, Mr. Sop plans to
develop a validated, objective pain measurement tool that could virtually eliminate pain-related
misdiagnoses, opioid overuse or underuse, stigma and bilateral mistrust between physicians
and their pain patients.