[1] Cunningham's research interests include biophotonics, bionanophotonics, micro/nanofabrication processes & materials, Bio-MEMS, lab-on-a-chip, microfluidics, biosensing, and applications in drug discovery, health diagnostics, mobile point-of-use detection systems, life science research, environmental monitoring, animal health, and food safety.
[3] Cunningham is most known for his invention and application of nanostructured photonic surfaces that efficiently couple electromagnetic energy into biological analytes, enabling high signal-to-noise sensing of materials that include small molecules, nucleic acids, proteins, virus particles, cells, and tissues.
From 1990-1991, he was a postdoctorate scientist at Sandia National Laboratory in the compound semiconductor research group, where he contributed to the development of epitaxial crystal growth methods for InAsSb strained layer superlattices for infrared photodiode sensor applications.
[13] In June 2000 founded SRU Biosystems, a company that commercialized Photonic Crystal (PC) biosensors, detection instruments, and assays for applications in drug discovery and diagnostics.
[15] Cunningham joined the faculty of the ECE Department at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2004 as an associate professor, where he established the Nanosensors Group at the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory (MNTL).
[6] In addition to leading his own research group, Cunningham serves as the PI of the Omics Nanotechnology for Cancer Precision Medicine (ONC-PM) Theme at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB), where he leads a team for the development of liquid biopsy approaches to cancer diagnostics in collaboration with clinicians at Mayo Clinic.
Using a novel concept for coupling electromagnetic energy from the macro scale into plasmonic nanoantennas, the Cunningham group was the first to report a new form of biosensor microscopy (Photonic Resonator Absorption Microscopy) and couple it to novel biochemistry approaches for ultrasensitive, single-step, amplification-free detection of proteins or nucleic acid targets with a simple/inexpensive instrument.