He earned a B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, then earned his M.S and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame with Hsueh-Chia Chang on problems in microfluidics and electrokinetics. He then spent two years as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where he worked in microfluidics and cell migration with Peter Devreotes. Gagnon received the NSF CAREER Award in 2014 and was a recent recipient of the 2017 NASA Early Career Faculty Award. His group focuses on electrokinetic processes that occur in microscale systems, both experimentally and theoretically. Specific areas of interest include dynamic polarization processes at microfluidic interfaces, dielectrophoresis, isotachophoresis, flows in micro-chemical environments, and biosensing for portable diagnostics.