He has degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Wisconsin – Madison (B.S. 2003) and MIT (Ph.D. 2009), where he worked with Dane Wittrup on engineering fibronectin domains as antibody mimics. Prof. Hackel was a postdoctoral fellow in Radiology at Stanford University with Sam Gambhir where he developed molecular probes for cancer detection and characterization via positron emission tomography. Since its inception at the University of Minnesota in 2011, the Hackel lab uses directed evolution to engineer synthetic protein ligands for in vivo targeting and molecular imaging. In addition to his primary appointment, Prof. Hackel is a graduate faculty member of Biomedical Engineering and a member of the University of Minnesota Masonic Cancer Center, the Institute for Engineering in Medicine, and the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute.