An engineer who ended up watching molecules meet
Walk into Resonant Sensors Incorporated, a small company on Yates Street in Arlington, Texas, and the person running it is not a career biologist. Debra Wawro Weidanz trained as an electrical engineer. Today she is the co-founder, CEO and chief scientist of a firm whose instruments let scientists watch, in real time and without a single fluorescent dye, the moment two molecules bind to each other. Those measurements sit at the center of modern drug work: antibody discovery, immunotherapy research, screening and diagnostics.
The tool she helped build is based on a physics idea called guided-mode resonance. In plain terms, a nanostructured grating is tuned so that a specific color of light resonates against it. When molecules land on the sensor surface, that resonance shifts, and the shift can be read as a signal. No labels, no heavy chemistry, just light reporting on what is happening at the surface. It is the kind of quiet, precise measurement that speeds up the slow, expensive parts of developing a biologic.
Weidanz did not start out planning to run a life-science company. She spent close to seven years working in telecommunications after graduating, in what she has described as a stable industry position. Then she left it.
"I made the decision to jump from a nice, stable industry position to leading a new business venture, and I have never looked back."
From a UTA lab to a company
The technology traces back to the University of Texas at Arlington, where Weidanz earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1997 and a master's in 1999. As a graduate student she worked on a novel sensor system alongside electrical engineering professor Robert Magnusson and PhD candidate Sorin Tibuleac. Magnusson, who holds a distinguished chair in nanoelectronics, became the company's chief technology officer. The research they published on guided-mode resonance is the foundation Resonant Sensors was built on.
The company's pitch is straightforward: make the reading of molecular interactions faster and simpler so that biotech teams can get to answers sooner. Its systems are described as label-free and high-throughput, running on disposable microarray plates and reading spectral shifts as binding happens. During the pandemic, that same core sensing approach was applied to COVID-19 testing - a reminder that a platform built for antibody screening can be pointed at many problems.
A second company, and an exit
Resonant Sensors was not the only company Weidanz helped start. She co-founded Abexxa Biologics with her husband, Jon Weidanz, a UTA professor and senior research administrator. Abexxa went after a hard problem in cancer immunotherapy: finding new biomarkers and targets among the thousands of proteins hidden inside tumor cells, including proteins presented on the cell surface that antibodies could be trained to recognize.
The work drew notice. In 2017 Abexxa was named one of 40 "Best University Startups" by the National Council of Entrepreneurial Tech Transfer, and it won a Massachusetts Biotechnology Council-sponsored Innovation Day competition. The company operated out of UTA facilities and set up a presence at LabCentral in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2021 Abexxa was acquired by Boehringer Ingelheim, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.
"UTA gave me the foundation to pursue a career in science and technology. Jon and I are excited to invest in the next generation of researchers."
Giving it back
Success has pointed the Weidanzes back toward the place their careers began. Over time the couple has contributed more than $500,000 to UT Arlington. In 2025 the university named the Debra and Jon Weidanz Tissue Engineering Laboratory in the Department of Bioengineering - the first named laboratory in that department. The lab, more than 1,300 square feet in the Engineering Research Building, supports work on micro- and nanomaterials for tissue repair, nanoparticle drug delivery and nanocomposite materials, and the gift funds equipment, graduate fellowships and undergraduate research.
Weidanz also serves on UTA's Bioengineering and Electrical Engineering Industrial Advisory Boards, and she is a longtime member of SPIE, the international optics and photonics society, where her name appears on published work about guided-mode resonance biosensors. The through-line across all of it - the two companies, the advisory roles, the giving - is a stated ambition to help make North Texas a serious hub for biotech.
The unusual part
What makes Weidanz's path notable is the crossing of disciplines. Engineers who commercialize their own inventions are not rare. Engineers who then move into immunology, co-found a company with a spouse from a different field, and steer it to acquisition by a global pharma are much rarer. She kept the title of chief scientist even as CEO, which says something about how she works: close to the technology, not above it.
Her career reads like a series of decisions to take the less-safe option and stay curious about problems outside her original training. The telecom job was comfortable. The startup was not. She chose the startup, then did it again. For someone whose degrees are both in electrical engineering, ending up with a laboratory named after her in a bioengineering department is a fitting kind of full circle.