Since becoming a part of the Georgia Tech faculty in 2012, where he holds a joint appointment in Materials Science and Engineering, Cai has played a pivotal role in advancing research on nanophotonic materials and devices. Notably, his authored work, "Optical Metamaterials: Fundamentals and Applications," serves as a globally recognized textbook and reference.

Cai's accolades include the OSA/SPIE Joseph W. Goodman Book Writing Award, the CooperVision Science & Technology Award, and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award. He is also a Fellow of SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics.

Optica Fellows, a select group representing no more than 10 percent of the total membership, are individuals who have demonstrated exceptional dedication to advancing optics and photonics. The election process is highly competitive, with candidates recommended by the Fellow Members Committee and subsequently approved by the Awards Council and Board of Directors.

Alongside 128 other distinguished individuals, Cai will be honored at Optica conferences and events throughout 2024. The comprehensive list of the 2024 Optica Fellows is accessible online.

In addition to student research skill development, this biannual grant program gives faculty with novel research topics the ability to develop preliminary data to pursue follow-up funding sources. The Core Facility Seed Grant program is supported by the Southeastern Nanotechnology Infrastructure Corridor (SENIC), a member of the National Science Foundation’s National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI).

Since the start of the grant program in 2014, 82 projects from ten different schools in Georgia Tech’s Colleges of Engineering and Science, as well as the Georgia Tech Research Institute and three other universities, have been seeded.

The four winning projects in this round were awarded IEN cleanroom and lab access time to be used over the next year. In keeping with the interdisciplinary mission of IEN, the projects that will be enabled by the grants include research in microelectronics, optoelectronics, battery technology, and novel materials for energy harvesting.

The Spring 2022 IEN Core Facility Seed Grant Award winners are:

Aluminum Oxide/Silver Microcavities for Trapping Light and Producing Polariton Coupling
PI: Juan-Pablo Correa-Baena
Student: Martin Gomez
School of Materials Science and Engineering

Facile and Scalable Fabrication of 3D-Patterned Current Collectors for Li-metal Batteries
PI: Hailong Chen
Student: Jakub Pepas
George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering/School of Materials Science and Engineering

Elucidating Connections between the Piezoelectric and Auxetic Responses of Cellulose
PI: Meisha Shofner
Student: Fariha Rubaiya
School of Materials Science and Engineering

Low-Cost, Self-Propagating, Reactive Nanoporous Ni/Al Interconnects for Low-Stress Die Assembly
PI: Vanessa Smet and Antonia Antoniou
Student: Ali Amirnasiri
George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

The Southeastern Nanotechnology Infrastructure Corridor, a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure, is funded by NSF Grant ECCS-2025462.

Cressler has been a prolific researcher and educator in the development of novel micro/nanoelectronic and photonic devices, circuits, and systems using nanoscale silicon-germanium (SiGe) alloys. He and his team apply these technologies to next-generation communications systems, ground and space-based radar and remote sensing systems, quantum science, and planetary exploration missions.

A proud Georgia Tech alumnus, Cressler graduated with his B.S. degree in physics in 1984. He spent eight-and-a-half years at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1990, and then worked for 10 years on the ECE faculty at Auburn University. Cressler joined Georgia Tech in 2002 as a professor in ECE, and from 2004-2013, he held the title of Ken Byers Professor. He was appointed as the Schlumberger Chair Professor in Electronics in 2013 and as a Ken Byers Teaching Fellow in Science and Religion in 2017.

Cressler and his students have produced over 750 refereed journal and conference papers. He has written three textbooks, edited three others, and written 31 book chapters. He is also a part-time novelist and has published three historical novels set in medieval Muslim Spain, with a fourth nearing completion.

During his career at Georgia Tech, Cressler has received over 100 research grants and contracts, totaling more than $30 million. He has graduated 62 Ph.D. students during his career, 53 of whom received their degrees from Georgia Tech. Cressler also serves as the associate director of the Georgia Electronic Design Center, a position that he has held since 2015. Throughout his career, he has received numerous awards for his research accomplishments, including being named an IEEE Fellow and an IEEE Third Millennium Medal recipient.

Cressler is highly dedicated to his classroom teaching and student mentoring. He is a mainstay in the microelectronics instructional program in ECE for both the undergraduate and graduate students. His book, Silicon-Germanium Heterojunction Bipolar Transistors, is the most widely referenced book in this area and is used as a textbook for graduate classes at a number of universities.

Cressler also teaches two highly popular courses that are open to all Georgia Tech undergraduate students. CoE 3002 —Introduction to the Microelectronics and Nanotechnology Revolution serves both the Technology and Management Program and the Honors Program, while IAC 2002—Science, Engineering, and Religion: An Interfaith Dialogue serves the Georgia Tech-Emory Leadership and Multifaith Program Partnership.

Cressler has received numerous local, national, and international teaching and mentoring honors throughout his career. Earlier this year, he received the 2021 IEEE James H. Mulligan Education Medal “for inspirational teaching and mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students.” In 2020, Cressler received the Outstanding Educator Award from the IEEE Atlanta Section, and in 2013, he received Georgia Tech’s highest award for faculty, the Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award.

Cressler has been an active member and leader in his professional communities and at Georgia Tech. He has held leadership roles in four different IEEE societies, including as editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices. Cressler led an Institute-level task force on the Georgia Tech Honors Program that helped to strengthen the program’s mission and better serve students’ needs. Currently, he serves on a Georgia Tech committee focused on supporting mental health, substance abuse, and suicide prevention efforts on campuses throughout the University System of Georgia.

“John is exceptionally deserving of being named as a Regents Professor, and I am very happy that the University System Board of Regents and the Georgia Tech administration have chosen John to hold this title,” said Douglas M. Blough, the Interim Steve W. Chaddick School Chair for ECE. “He is an outstanding research scholar and teacher, an inspirational mentor to his students, and a dedicated member of his professional and campus communities. He has our heartfelt thanks for all that he has done for ECE and Georgia Tech, and we are fortunate to have him as a colleague and friend.”

-Christa M. Ernst

For More Information on the Photonics Program Contact:

Maria Matheson [maria.matheson@ien.gatech.edu]
Program & Operations Manager
Georgia Electronic Design Center
Georgia Institute of Technology
C: 770-833-3029

Stephen Ralph [stephen.ralph@ece.gatech.edu]
Director, Georgia Electronic Design Center (GEDC)
Professor—School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Taghinejad is a Ph.D. candidate at the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). Under the supervision of ECE Professor Wenshan Cai, he is studying the optically excited states of various materials such as metals, semiconductors, and conductive oxides to develop ultrafast optical switches and light modulators. His goal is to bridge the gap between state-of-the-art electronics and ultrafast optics to introduce practical methodologies for high-speed and low-energy hybrid electro-optical data processing units. Taghinejad is the recipient of the 2020 ECE Graduate Research Assistant Excellence Award from the School of ECE at Georgia Tech. 

In 2020, the Society is awarding $298,000 in education scholarships to 78 outstanding SPIE student members, based on their potential contribution to optics and photonics or to a related discipline. Award-winning applicants were evaluated, selected, and approved by the SPIE Scholarship Committee, chaired by SPIE volunteer Kate Medicus. Through 2019, SPIE has distributed over $6 million dollars in individual scholarships. This ambitious effort reflects the Society's commitment to education and to the next generation of optical scientists and engineers around the world. 

SPIE is the international society for optics and photonics, an educational not-for-profit organization founded in 1955 to advance light-based science, engineering, and technology. The Society serves more than 255,000 constituents from 183 countries, offering conferences and their published proceedings, continuing education, books, journals, and the SPIE Digital Library. In 2019, SPIE provided more than $5.6 million in community support, including scholarships and awards, outreach and advocacy programs, travel grants, public policy, and educational resources. 

Offered beginning in 2013, this grant program has seeded sixty projects with students working in ten different schools in COE and COS, as well as the Georgia Tech Research Institute and 3 other universities.

In addition to IEN cleanroom and characterization lab access for the next year, the 4 students in this round, from a diverse group of engineering disciplines, will be provided travel support to present their findings at a technical conference. In keeping with the interdisciplinary mission of IEN, the projects that will be enabled by the grants include research in quantum computing, microfluidics, and new materials for electronic and biomedical applications.

Fall 2019 IEN Facility Seed Grant Awards:

Synthesis and Characterization of Functional Hierarchically Porous Metal-Organic Frameworks
PI: Sankar Nair
Student: Arvind Ganesan
School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

Quantum Paraelectricity in Hafnia-Zirconia based Ferroic Materials for Quantum Computing
PI: Asif Khan
Student: Muhammad Mainul Islam
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Microfabrication and Characterization of Phononic Topological Insulators
PI: Michael Leamy and Nazanin Bassiri-Gharb
Student: Emily Kliewer
School of Mechanical Engineering, School of Materials Science and Engineering

Microfabrication of Cell Biomarker Extraction Platform for Inline Intracellular Analysis
PI: Andrei Fedorov
Student: Austin Culberson
School of Mechanical Engineering

Ougazzaden is the director of Georgia Tech-Lorraine (GTL) and a professor at the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). He was specifically recognized for his achievements in semiconductor science and technology during his 29-year-long career. 

Metz mayor, Dominique Gros, pinned the medal on behalf of French President Emmanuel Macron, while Ougazzaden was surrounded by family and friends; eminent colleagues in science, research, and innovation; students; and dignitaries from around the world. An important delegation came from his native Morocco to join in celebrating this well-deserved honor.

Never satisfied with the status quo, Ougazzaden shared memories of a childhood in Casablanca, Morocco that instilled in him a lifelong curiosity and love of science. With a trajectory that has taken him all over the world, from Morocco to France, to the United States and then back to France again, Ougazzaden has long been a sought-after researcher and academic.

Ougazzaden’s specific areas of expertise cover the fields of materials, photonics, and optoelectronics, and he has published over 450 papers and has generated 26 patents in these areas. He began his career with CNET (Centre National d’Etudes de Télécommunications) and France Télécom, where he worked on the development of fiber optics. Ougazzaden then came to the United States, where he spent four years working at Lucent, Agere Systems, and Triquint Semiconductor. In 2003, he returned to France and became a professor at the University of Metz.

In 2005, Ougazzaden joined the Georgia Tech School of ECE as a professor based at the GTL campus in Metz, France. He worked with the CNRS (the French National Center for Science) and Georgia Tech to establish France’s first International Joint Research Laboratory, GT-CNRS UMI 2958. The lab is located at GTL, and he served as its director from 2006-2018.

Ougazzaden currently serves as the director of GTL and is the co-founder and co-president of Institut Lafayette, an innovation platform that provides access to world-class facilities and expertise in advanced semiconductor materials/devices research and prototyping for innovations in optoelectronics. Institut Lafayette also offers technology transfer services that accelerate and increase the efficiency of commercialization of these innovations.

Mayor Gros thanked Ougazzaden for his cross-cultural contributions amongst Morocco, France, and the United States and for maintaining an international dialogue in academics, research, and innovation. “For every speech, there needs to be a spark or conductive wire, especially when we are honoring a semiconductor specialist,” quipped Mayor Gros in an article published by La Semaine de Metz. “That spark is that you [Ougazzaden] have never stopped contributing to the dialogue. This dialogue between professional worlds must be unraveled between the world of research and the needs of industry.”

Additional credits: Andrea Gappell, assistance with French to English translations with portions of the article; Arnaud Hussenot, photography.

The award was sponsored by AIXTRON, a market leader in MOVPE tool manufacturing and related technologies. Sundaram is on the research faculty at Georgia Tech-Lorraine and an adjunct faculty member in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). He leads the MOVPE growth-based activity in ECE Professor Abdallah Ougazzaden’s research group, which is focused on wide bandgap materials and nanostructure for opto-electronic applications.

Sundaram was recognized for his paper entitled “Selective Area van der Waals Epitaxial Growth of III-N Device Structures on Lateral Quality Controlled 2D h-BN.” This work is devoted to a Metalorganic Vapor Phase Epitaxy (MOVPE) growth study of III-N based device structures such as light emitting diodes (LEDs) on layered h-BN realized on patterned sapphire substrates. Supported by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (the French equivalent of the National Science Foundation in the United States), this research would have direct applications in industry for flexible displays, wearable sensors, and InGaN-based tandem solar cells.

Sundaram’s coauthors on the paper are Taha Ayari and Jean Paul Salvestrini of GT-Lorraine and GT-CNRS UMI 2958; Abdallah Ougazzaden, Soufiane Karrakchou, and Paul L. Voss of the School of ECE at Georgia Tech; and Adama Mballo, Phuong Vuong, and Yacine Halfaya of GT-CNRS UMI 2958. Patterning and device fabrication were carried out at Institut Lafayette, a platform promoting technology transfer and innovation in the optoelectronics sector.

Razi Dehghannasiri’s thesis is entitled "Hypersonic phononic crystal structures for integrated nano-electromechanical/optomechanical devices.” Integrated phononic devices fabricated on silicon chips are of great interest for diverse scientific and industrial applications. Dehghannasiri’sdissertation presents the study of such integrated phononic devices in new CMOS-compatible platforms in the form of phononic crystal (PnC) structures (i.e., periodic structures supporting phononic bandgaps). These phononic structures have a higher efficiency and lower phononic/photonic losses. 

In particular, this dissertation presents the experimental study of the developed hypersonic pillar-based PnC platform with wideband surface phononic bandgaps on AlN-on-Si substrates for wireless communications. In addition, this dissertation includes the study of membrane PnC structures in silicon nitride for efficient stimulated Brillouin scattering in structures compatible with integrated optics platforms for on-chip RF-photonics. Advised by ECE Joseph M. Pettit Professor Ali Adibi, Dehghannasirigraduated last spring and is now a silicon photonics integration engineer with Intel Corporation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. 

Sean Rodrigues’ thesis is entitled "Instigating chiral-selective nonlinear optical phenomena in metamaterials.” Photonic metamaterials, engineered materials composed of building blocks smaller than the wavelength of light, provide a unique approach to create optical elements that are only 10’s of nanometers thick. 

In Rodrigues’ thesis, the Cai Lab introduces handed asymmetry into these nanostructures, in order to achieve strong polarization and nonlinear optical effects. The resulting research has impacts within the nanophotonics community that may result in photonic equipment for polarization and light management systems in augmented reality, LiDAR technologies, tamper proofing, and chiral sensing. Advised by ECE Associate Professor Wenshan Cai, Rodrigues graduated last summer and is now a senior scientist with Toyota Research Institute in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

This is our sixth installment of interviews with the students who spent their summer conducting research at Georgia Tech. Ronald Reliford Jr. is the first-generation college attendee from his family and hails from Campti, Louisiana. Ronald is attending Northwestern State University; Natchitoches, LA, majoring in Electronics Engineering and Technologies. Mr. Reliford worked with mentor Chuan-Wei Tsou in the laboratory of Professor Shyh-Chiang Shen (ECE).

1. What sparked your interest in engineering and what problems are you hoping to help solve as an engineer?

I have always been a problem solver, so engineering naturally sparked my interest. The idea that I could possibly change the world for the better via engineering and electronics design is exciting and inspiring.

2. What research are you conducting at GT and what applications do you feel this research may have?

I am working in the lab of Professor Shen conducting research on bio-inspired optoelectronics devices. The work I am participating in is to further the understanding of why biological organisms, such as fire-flies, produce certain colors of light and how these biologically based light sources may be applied to optoelectronics for compact light sources. These low to no heat emitting light sources may be beneficially applied in healthcare diagnostics and other harsh environments where light with minimal thermal effect is necessary.

3. What has been your favorite lab activity/ tool training/ etc. thus far and why?

As my career goal is centered on circuit board design and manufacture, my favorite activity has been the access to hands-on, industry grade tools for research. I loved training on the K & S Ball-Bonder, a circuit board wiring and fabrication tool. 

4. Do you feel this REU experience has helped prepare you for working in a collaborative laboratory environment and furthered your education goals?

Yes, I believe the REU program has tremendous benefits! The hands-on experience and wealth of knowledge available here have definitely pushed me to realize my educational goals. The resource availability, whether it be a lab, tool, PI or mentor, have allowed me to be able to take the electrical engineering concepts learned in the classroom and apply it to actual experimentation. This ability to go beyond theory to practice is invaluable for undergraduate students who often do not have the chance to work in a laboratory environment.

5. What are your plans post-undergraduate?

My plans post-undergraduate include attending graduate school and pursuing a career in industry, targeting Apple or Samsung. As far as where I will attend for graduate studies, I would love to come back to Georgia Tech! Closer to home, I am considering application at the University of Texas at Dallas.

 6. What is your favorite thing about/impression of GA Tech and ATL?

My favorite thing about Georgia Tech is how the campus environment is so intellectually stimulating. Everyone I’ve interacted with has been incredibly friendly and helpful. Additionally, although the workload kept me busy, I did have a chance to see a bit of the city and it is truly quite beautiful, with great scenery and tons to do. Off campus, I truly enjoyed a trip to Stone Mountain to celebrate the 4^th of July.

The SENIC REU program is funded by NSF award EEC-1757579.

Comparing the quantum properties of these emerging so-called hybrid semiconductors with those of their established predecessors is about like comparing the Bolshoi Ballet to jumping jacks. Twirling troupes of quantum particles undulate through the emerging materials, creating, with ease, highly desirable optoelectronic (light-electronic) properties, according to a team of physical chemists led by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

These same properties are impractical to achieve in established semiconductors.

The particles moving through these new materials also engage the material itself in the quantum action, akin to dancers enticing the floor to dance with them. The researchers were able to measure patterns in the material caused by the dancing and relate them to the emerging material’s quantum properties and to energy introduced into the material.

These insights could help engineers work productively with the new class of semiconductors.

Unusually flexible semiconductors

The emerging material’s ability to house diverse, eccentric quantum particle movements, analogous to the dancers, is directly related to its unusual flexibility on a molecular level, analogous to the dancefloor that joins in the dances. By contrast, established semiconductors have rigid, straight-laced molecular structures that leave the dancing to quantum particles.

The class of hybrid semiconductors the researchers examined is called halide organic-inorganic perovskite (HOIP), which will be explained in more detail at bottom along with the “hybrid” semiconductor designation, which combines a crystal lattice -- common in semiconductors -- with a layer of innovatively flexing material.

Beyond their promise of unique radiance and energy-efficiency, HOIPs are easy to produce and apply.

Paint them on

“One compelling advantage is that HOIPs are made using low temperatures and processed in solution,” said Carlos Silva, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “It takes much less energy to make them, and you can make big batches.” Silva co-led the study alongside Ajay Ram Srimath Kandada from Georgia Tech and the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia.

It takes high temperatures to make most semiconductors in small quantities, and they are rigid to apply to surfaces, but HOIPs could be painted on to make LEDs, lasers or even window glass that could glow in any color from aquamarine to fuchsia. Lighting with HOIPs may require very little energy, and solar panel makers could boost photovoltaics’ efficiency and slash production costs.

The team led by Georgia Tech included researchers from the Université de Mons in Belgium and the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia. The results were published on January 14, 2019, in the journal Nature Materials. The work was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, EU Horizon 2020, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Fond Québécois pour la Recherche, and the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office.  

[Thinking about grad school? Here's how to apply to Georgia Tech.]

Quantum jumping jacks

Semiconductors in optoelectronic devices can either convert light into electricity or electricity into light. The researchers concentrated on processes connected to the latter: light emission.

The trick to getting a material to emit light is, broadly speaking, to apply energy to electrons in the material, so that they take a quantum leap up from their orbits around atoms then emit that energy as light when they hop back down to the orbits they had vacated. Established semiconductors can trap electrons in areas of the material that strictly limit the electrons’ range of motion then apply energy to those areas to make electrons do quantum leaps in unison to emit useful light when they hop back down in unison.

“These are quantum wells, two-dimensional parts of the material that confine these quantum properties to create these particular light emission properties,” Silva said.

Imaginary particle excitement

There is a potentially more attractive way to produce the light, and it is a core strength of the new hybrid semiconductors. 

An electron has a negative charge, and an orbit it vacates after having been excited by energy is a positive charge called an electron hole. The electron and the hole can gyrate around each other forming a kind of imaginary particle, or quasiparticle, called an exciton. 

“The positive-negative attraction in an exciton is called binding energy, and it’s a very high-energy phenomenon, which makes it great for light emitting,” Silva said.

When the electron and the hole reunite, that releases the binding energy to make light. But usually, excitons are very hard to maintain in a semiconductor.

“The excitonic properties in conventional semiconductors are only stable at extremely cold temperatures,” Silva said. “But in HOIPs the excitonic properties are very stable at room temperature.”

Ornate quasiparticle twirling

Excitons get freed up from their atoms and move around the material. In addition, excitons in an HOIP can whirl around other excitons, forming quasiparticles called biexcitons. And there’s more.

Excitons also spin around atoms in the material lattice. Much the way an electron and an electron hole create an exciton, this twirl of the exciton around an atomic nucleus gives rise to yet another quasiparticle called a polaron. All that action can result in excitons transitioning to polarons back. One can even speak of some excitons taking on a “polaronic” nuance.

Compounding all those dynamics is the fact that HOIPs are full of positively and negatively charged ions. The ornateness of these quantum dances has an overarching effect on the material itself.

Wave patterns resonate

The uncommon participation of atoms of the material in these dances with electrons, excitons, biexcitons and polarons creates repetitive nanoscale indentations in the material that are observable as wave patterns and that shift and flux with the amount of energy added to the material.

“In a ground state, these wave patterns would look a certain way, but with added energy, the excitons do things differently. That changes the wave patterns, and that’s what we measure,” Silva said. “The key observation in the study is that the wave pattern varies with different types of excitons (exciton, biexciton, polaronic/less polaronic).”

The indentations also grip the excitons, slowing their mobility through the material, and all these ornate dynamics may affect the quality of light emission.

Rubber band sandwich

The material, a halide organic-inorganic perovskite, is a sandwich of two inorganic crystal lattice layers with some organic material in between them – making HOIPs an organic-inorganic hybrid material. The quantum action happens in the crystal lattices.

The organic layer in between is like a sheet of rubber bands that makes the crystal lattices into a wobbly but stable dancefloor. Also, HOIPs are put together with many non-covalent bonds, making the material soft.

Individual units of the crystal take a form called perovskite, which is a very even diamond shape, with a metal in the center and halogens such as chlorine or iodine at the points, thus “halide.” For this study, the researchers used a 2D prototype with the formula (PEA)₂PbI₄.

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The study was co-authored by Félix Thouin (co-first author), David A. Valverde-Chávez (co-first author), and Ilaria Bargigia, all of Georgia Tech; Claudio Quarti and David Beljonne of the Université de Mons in Belgium; Daniele Cortecchia and Annamaria Petrozza of the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia. The research was funded by EU Horizon 2020 (project 705874); the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada; Fond Québécois pour la Recherche: Nature et Technologies; the National Science Foundation (grant 1838276); Interuniversity Attraction Pole program of the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (PAI 6/27) and the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique de Belgique (FNRS-F.R.S.). Beljonne is an F.R.S. director. Any findings, opinions, and conclusions are those of the authors and not necessarily of the funding agencies.

This is our fourth installment of interviews with the students who spent their summer conducting research at Georgia Tech. Matthew Johnson, a student at the Freed-Hardman University during the program period, worked with mentor Srinivas Kumar in the laboratory of Professor Todd Sulchek (ME).

1. What sparked your interest in engineering and what problems are you hoping to help solve as an engineer?

My interest in engineering stems from a love for science, mathematics and creativity. The art of design is something that can go unnoticed by many people, but once you realize the engineered intricacies in the objects around you, it can’t be unseen. I hope to have a career in which I design mechanical devices with improved quality and efficiency.    

2. What research are you conducting at GT and what applications do you feel this research may have?

My research is focused on the fabrication and optimization of microfluidic devices. These devices assist in research across a wide range of disciplines. Some of the devices use microfluidic channels and ridges to induce the adsorption of macromolecules by cells, indicating the potential for new ways of delivering medicine. Another device in the lab’s research is designed to sort cells into reservoirs based on their stiffness. The elastic properties of the cells corresponds to drug-resistance in certain types of cancer cells. One of my target assignments involves the design of a ‘chip holder’ to conduct more effective experimentation.

3. What has been your favorite lab activity/ tool training/ etc. thus far and why?

My favorite tool on which I’ve been trained thus far is the Nanoscribe 3D Lithography machine. Comparing the lengthy and complicated process of photolithography, with spin-coater and mask-development stages, to the relative simple utility of the Nanoscribe machine makes me appreciate what research toolmakers are capable of. After one session with the tool, the potential for nanotechnology research was clear, and I fully expect other lithography and microfabrication tool manufacturers will also adopt the efficient processing flow that combines the deposition and etch functions.

4. Do you feel this REU experience has helped prepare you for working in a collaborative laboratory environment and furthered your education goals?

Absolutely. I appreciate the opportunities the REU has afforded me to learn advanced, useful information, and to be exposed to realistic and applicable in-lab experience. Although the program is not even at the halfway point, I already feel that my understanding and ability to perform in a laboratory setting has developed tremendously. Being able to involve myself in engineering practices and training beyond the classroom has equipped me to pursue undergraduate and graduate level engineering studies with increased direction.

5. What are your plans post-undergraduate?

Before I complete my undergraduate studies in engineering, I will need to transfer from Freed-Hardman University. My experience at FHU has been phenomenal and integral to my overall academic progress, especially in the fields of Biblical Studies and English. However, FHU does not offer the kind of intensive and complete engineering coursework to satisfy my final undergraduate needs. Part of my goal this summer has been to explore the possibility of Georgia Tech as my next home after my FHU coursework is complete. Beyond my undergraduate work, I do hope to continue to attain engineering degrees at the M.S. and Ph.D. levels and perhaps a career in instruction or academic research.

6. What is your favorite thing about/impression of GA Tech and ATL?

 My favorite thing about my time at Georgia Tech has been the efforts made by the faculty, staff, and fellow student researchers to involve me in the scientific process as closely as possible. It is easy to feel actually included in cutting-edge research projects, which is my favorite way to learn. The campus facilities and research equipment are very impressive, and I also enjoy Georgia Tech’s ability to combine the bustling excitement of the downtown Atlanta location with the homey, green campus of the main University area.

The SENIC REU program is funded by NSF award EEC-1757579.

“She would go hiking and my grandfather would stay home,” said Wan, a graduate student in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, who works in the lab of Hang Lu, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering.

“It’s something you don’t always think about, but the fact is, aging is the single largest risk factor for chronic disease in humans,” he added. “Your risk of heart disease, cancer – it all goes up as you age.”

As Wan moved further and further away from childhood and started meeting more and more “old” people, his interest grew, and he noticed that there isn’t a whole lot of research being done to understand the processes of aging.

“We might know that aging can affect a neuron’s health or your brain’s health, but we can’t really say why that’s happening,” said Wan, who received a $5,000 award from the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR), to study aging through gene expression.

Aging can be difficult to study or accurately describe because it’s not like there is a single factor or phenotype to look for. Improved therapeutics and healthier behaviors have doubled human lifespans over the past 200 years, “so a lot of people are spending a larger portion of their lives in aging-related poor health,” Wan said. “But people experience aging differently.”

He’s looking at studying gene expression as a way to more accurately measure aging.

“If you study the patterns of gene expression, you might be able to see genetic networks and specific tissues that play roles in age-related degradation, and I’m looking at this in the context of the whole organism,” Wan said.

So, for the next few months, Wan is trying to develop a platform using microfluidics to optimize smFISH (single molecule fluorescent in situ hybridization), used to detect, localize, and count individual mRNA molecules to measure gene expression.

“There are certain limitations with the technology,” Wan said. “But microfluidics can overcome these shortcomings.”

Prof. Khan gave the welcome note and explained that the brains of our electronic gadgets, the chips, are made in the clean room by showcasing a 300 mm silicon wafer and a video on how sand is transformed into silicon chips. Prof. Ansari gave a brief talk on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) devices that are used in cell phones for sensing, navigation and communication, followed by Dr. Hang Chen (GT-IEN) who gave tutorial on basic cleanroom safety and environmental protocols and the reasons for “gowning up”. After the lecture portion, the Gwinnett students joined Georgia Tech graduate students Anthony Gaskell, Nujhat Tasneem, and Mingyo Park in the gowning room to suit up and tour the various areas of the cleanroom and fabrication tools.

The event was a winner with the students, as some of their comments made clear. When asked about their favorite part of the site visit there was a definite theme, “…putting on the clean room suits and touching the pure gold…”  One student stated, “The best part was going into the clean room looking like I was about to go to space. I had never thought about how clean an environment needs to be so that the chips that go into our phones and computers can be properly processed.” another noted, “The best part of the visit was actually preparing to enter the clean room. I would have never guessed a person would have to wear a lot of protective gear to prevent the releasing of particles in the air.”

The “gowns-on” approach to the STEM outreach was, perhaps, best summed up by this testimonial, “A firsthand experience as to what they do at the school (Georgia Tech) for that field, rather than just a presentation and Q&A (Going inside a clean room!). I personally loved this trip because this experience helps me see my possible future major, and even school!”

Professors Khan and Ansari would also like to thank graduate student Zheng Wang (ECE), who helped with organizing the visit.

IEN is the organizational home for Georgia Tech's professional nanotechnology support team and physical infrastructure, which includes several research buildings and shared user laboratories valued in excess of $400MUS. IEN also enables research for individual Principal Investigators in addition to several fundamental applied research centers, engineered systems laboratories, and strategic research programs. Additionally, Georgia Tech is proud to be the primary location of the Southeastern Nanotechnology Infrastructure Corridor (SENIC), one of the sites in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure (NNCI), as well as the home of the NNCI Coordinating Office.

The Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology began in 2007 as a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) charter school. Gwinnett County Public Schools sought to create a new high school with a rigorous, authentic STEM-focused curriculum. The district conducted national research of existing secondary school programs, reviewing curriculum, visiting campuses, and meeting with school leaders. In March of 2006, the Gwinnett County Board of Education approved a charter that allowed for the flexibility in curriculum design and scheduling needed to realize the vision for the school.

Shen is among the 98 OSA members elected to its 2019 class of Fellows.He is being recognized “for the development and advancement of compound semiconductor optoelectronic devices and integrated circuits.” 

A member of the ECE faculty since 2005, Shen leads the Semiconductor Research Lab, where he and his team work on wide-bandgap semiconductors and their applications in optoelectronics and power electronics. Their research is heavily sided on novel device design, validation, and manufacturable fabrication technology development for compound semiconductors. 

Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Shen developed a proprietary commercial-grade InP transistor technology that led to the first demonstration of monolithically integrated 40Gb/s PIN+TIA differential-output optical receivers. Since 2005, he has made significant technological impacts in advanced III-Nitride (III-N) wide-bandgap semiconductor device research. Many of his works at Tech stand as state-of-the-art III-N device demonstrations.

Shen’s research has yielded eight awarded U.S. patents, five book chapters, 170-plus publications in refereed journals and conferences, and many invited seminar talks to date. He is also an editor of a book entitled Nitride Semiconductor LEDs (2nd Ed., October 2017).

Shen has also been honored for his contributions in research and education at Georgia Tech. He received the Georgia Tech Outstanding Undergraduate Research Mentor Award in 2012; the ECE Outstanding Junior Faculty Member Award in 2011; and the ECE Richard M. Bass/Eta Kappa Nu Outstanding Teacher Award in 2010. 

Based on work known as “DNA barcoding,” the technique inserts unique snippets of DNA into as many as 150 different nanoparticles for simultaneous testing. The nanoparticles are then injected into animal models and allowed to travel to organs such as the liver, spleen or lungs. Genetic sequencing techniques then identify which DNA-labeled nanoparticles have reached specific organs.

In a paper published October 1 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a research team describes taking the process a step farther to verify that the nanoparticles have entered the cells of the specific organs. In addition to the DNA barcode, the researchers inserted into each nanoparticle a snippet of mRNA that is turned into a protein known as “Cre.” The Cre protein generates a red glow, identifying cells that the nanoparticles have entered and successfully delivered the mRNA drug, allowing the researchers to identify which nanoparticles can deliver RNA drugs to the cells of the specific organs.

“This technique, known as Fast Indication of Nanoparticle Discovery (FIND), will allow us to identify the right carrier far more quickly and less expensively than we have been able to do in the past,” said James E. Dahlman, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “As a result, the odds that we will be able to find carriers for specific tissues should increase dramatically.”

The FIND technique would replace in vitro screening, which has limited success at identifying nanoparticle carriers for the genetic therapies. The research was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health, and from the Cystic Fibrosis Research Foundation, the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation and the Bayer Hemophilia Awards Program. 

Therapies based on RNA and DNA could address a broad range of genetically based diseases, including atherosclerosis, where such therapies may be able to reverse the buildup of plaque in arteries. Nanoparticles used to deliver RNA and DNA into cells are made from several ingredients whose levels can be varied, creating the potential for tens of thousands of different nanoparticles. Finding the right combination of these ingredients to target specific cells has required extensive trial-and-error discovery processes that have limited the use of RNA and DNA therapies.

Use of the DNA barcoding process allows hundreds of possible nanoparticle combinations to be tested simultaneously in a single animal, but until now, researchers could only tell that the combination had reached specific organs. By examining which cells within the organs have the red glow, they can now verify that the nanoparticles carried the barcodes and delivered functional mRNA drugs into the cells.

In the paper, the researchers report discovering two nanoparticles that efficiently delivered siRNA, sgRNA and mRNA to endothelial cells in the spleen. The researchers believe their technique can deliver therapeutic RNA and DNA to a wide variety of endothelial cell types, and perhaps also to immune system and other cell types.

“The field has been able to functionally deliver genetic drugs to the liver, and we are now trying to use our technology to deliver to different organs and cell types to enable therapies to treat all of the cell types that are in the liver,” said Cory Sago, the paper’s first author and a Ph.D. candidate in Dahlman’s lab. “Now that we have a system that allows us to probe these questions at a very specific level of resolution, we now want to go after other cell types in a more efficient manner.”

Dahlman expects to put the new technology to use quickly. 

“We hope to take projects that would ordinarily require years and complete several of them within the next 12 months,” he said. “FIND could be used to carry all sorts of nucleic acid drugs into cells. That could include small RNAs, large RNAs, small DNAs and large DNAs – many different types of genetic drugs that are now being developed in research labs.”

Technical challenges ahead include demonstrating that identifying an affinity for mouse organs predicts which particles will work in the human body, and that the approach works for different classes of genetic therapies.

Experimentally, Dahlman’s lab produces the nanoparticles at three formulation stations that require about 90 seconds to produce each of the 250 or so samples used. The resulting nanoparticles are then examined for proper size range – 40 to 80 nanometers in diameter – before being purified and sterilized for injection into the animals. 

After three days, the researchers separate cells that are glowing red and sequence the DNA snippets in them to identify which chemical compositions were most successful at entering cells of specific organs. The most promising chemical compositions are used to develop of a new batch of candidate nanoparticles for a new round of screening, which takes about a week to complete.

“We want to evolve the best particles that we can,” Sago said. “Every single one of the components matters, and we work to get each component right for the cell type that we are interested in. There is a lot of optimization required.”

In addition to those already mentioned, the paper’s co-authors include Melissa P. Lokugamage, Kalina Paunovska, Daryll A. Vanover, Marielena Gamboa Castro, Shannon E. Anderson, Tobi G. Rudoltz, Gwyneth N. Lando, Pooja Tiwari, Jonathan L. Kirschman and Philip J. Santangelo, all of the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering; Chris M. Monaco, Young Jang and Nirav N. Shah of the Georgia Tech School of Biological Sciences; Nick Willett of Emory University and the Atlanta Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center, and Anton V. Bryksin of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech.

The research was supported by the NIH/NIGMS-sponsored Immunoengineering Training Program (T32EB021962), the Georgia Research Assistantship (Grant 3201330), the NIH/NIGMS-sponsored Cell and Tissue Engineering (CTEng) Biotechnology Training Program (T32GM008433), the National Institutes of Health GT BioMAT Training Grant (5T32EB006343), the Cystic Fibrosis Research Foundation (DAHLMA15XX0), the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation (PDF-JFA-1860), and the Bayer Hemophilia Awards Program (AGE DTD). This content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsors.

CITATION: Cory D. Sago, et al., “A high throughput in vivo screen of functional mRNA delivery identifies nanoparticles for endothelial cell gene editing,” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018) www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1811276115

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Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu).
Writer: John Toon

The Georgia Tech IEN is an Interdisciplinary Research Institute (IRI) comprised of faculty and students interested in using the most advanced fabrication and characterization tools, and cleanroom infrastructure, to facilitate research in micro- and nano-scale materials, devices, and systems. Applications of this research span all disciplines in science and engineering with particular emphasis on biomedicine, electronics, optoelectronics and photonics, and energy applications. As there can be a learning curve associated with initial proof-of-concept development and testing using cleanroom tools, this seed grant program was developed to expedite the initiation of new graduate students and new research projects into productive activity. Successful proposals to this program will identify a new, currently-unfunded research idea that requires core facility access to generate preliminary data necessary to pursue other funding avenues.

Program Eligibility

Georgia Tech Applicants
This program is open to any current Georgia Tech or GTRI faculty member as project PI. The graduate student performing the research should be in the first 2 years of his/her graduate studies, and preference will be given to students who are new users of the IEN facilities. The student’s research advisor (project PI) does not need to be a current user of the IEN cleanroom/lab facilities.

External (non-Georgia Tech) Applicants
Funding from the NSF to create the Southeastern Nanotechnology Infrastructure Corridor (SENIC, http://senic.gatech.edu/) as part of the NNCI has allowed IEN to open this program to external (not affiliated with Georgia Tech) users currently at an academic institution in the southeastern US. The graduate student performing the proposed research cannot be a current user of the IEN facilities. The student’s research advisor (project PI) may have a current project in place for use of the IEN cleanroom/lab facilities, but this is not a requirement. If awarded, a specialized service agreement will need to be arranged with the user’s home institution.

Past awardees of a seed grant may submit additional proposals for different students/projects, but not in consecutive funding cycles. It is the responsibility of the project PI and student to determine their ability to make use of the awarded time during the grant period. Extensions requested once the project has begun will not be granted.

Award Information

Each seed grant award will consist of free cleanroom access to the student identified in the proposal for 2 (consecutive) billing quarters. Based on current access rates and the academic cap on hourly charges (https://cleanroom.gatech.edu/articles/68), this comprises a maximum award of $6000 for the 6 month period. This maximum award amount is still in effect even if IEN non-cleanroom (lab) equipment, electron beam lithography (EBL), or tools in the Materials Characterization Facility (MCF) are required.

External projects may elect to use part of the award for travel support, up to a maximum of $1500. If you are requesting this support you will need to supply a brief budget and justification as an addendum to the proposal.

The designated student user is expected to only utilize the cleanroom/tool access while working with the PI on the proposed project. Members of the IEN processing staff will be available to consult during the project period. The number of awards for each proposal submission date will depend on the number and quality of the proposals. A short report describing the research activities is required midway and at the completion of the award period.

Submission Schedule

This Seed Grant program is offered in two competitions each year with due dates on October 1, 2018 and April 1, 2019. While it is expected that research activity will begin on December 1, 2018 and June 1, 2019, respectively, there is flexibility in scheduling the 2 quarters of research work, as long as they conform to the IEN billing quarters.

Proposal Requirements (2 pages max)
The proposal (submitted as a PDF file of no more than 2 pages) should do the following:
1. Provide a project title. List name of PI and student at the top of the proposal.
2. Identify the research problem and specify the proposed methods.
3. Indicate the IEN research tools necessary to conduct the research. It is recommended that you obtain assistance with this component from members of the IEN processing staff.
4. Describe the relationship of this research to the PI’s other research activity.
5. Identify the PI and the graduate student involved (including year of graduate work), and if there will be a mentoring relationship with the PI’s other students. Note if there are collaborative relationships with Georgia Tech faculty that bear on this research project.
6. Specify the potential for follow-on funding based on the results of this initial work.
7. Optional: Travel support budget and justification for external user (does not count in 2 page maximum).

Submit the PDF file by the specified due date to Ms. Amy Duke (amy.duke@ien.gatech.edu).

Review Criteria
Proposals will initially be reviewed by IEN staff for technical feasibility within the 6-month time frame. Rating of proposals will be done by a review committee of Georgia Tech faculty, with final selection of awardees by IEN staff. Review criteria include novelty of the research, clarity of the proposed work, work that is technically achievable within the time constraints, and likelihood of positive outcomes (funding).

Su is a May 2018 Ph.D. graduate of the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and now works at Google as a hardware engineer. She joined the ATHENA Lab in fall 2013, where she was advised by Manos Tentzeris, who holds the Ken Byers Professorship in Flexible Electronics. She received her bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Beijing Institute of Technology in summer 2013 and her master's in ECE at Georgia Tech in May 2015.

Su's Ph.D. research focuses on interface advanced novel fabrication techniques such as inkjet-printing and 3D printing, and special mechanical structures such as microfluidics and origami. She also works on high-performance microwave components/antennas to solve existing problems and extend to applications in smart health, wearable electronics in Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. Su specifically focuses on designing novel reconfigurable antennas/microwave passives components using dielectric liquid, as well as liquid metal alloy, and building liquid sensors/sensing platforms for easier communication and better sensing.

Ayari was recognized for his paper, “Van der Waal Epitaxy investigation of GaN-based materials on 2D h-BN by MOVPE for high performance opto-electronic devices.” This work is devoted to a Metalorganic Vapor Phase Epitaxy (MOVPE) growth study of GaN-based materials on 2D h-BN. Supported by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (the French equivalent of the National Science Foundation in the United States), this project aims to demonstrate high performance nitride-based flexible optoelectronics that can be used in LEDs, solar cells, and high-electron-mobility transistors (HEMTs). This research would also have direct applications in flexible displays, wearable sensors, and InGaN-based tandem solar cells.

Ayari’s coauthors on the paper were Ougazzaden; Suresh Sundaram and Jean Paul Salvestrini, of GT-L and GT-CNRS UMI 2958, a lab focusing on research in non-linear optics and dynamics, smart materials, and computer science; Saiful Alam and Paul Voss, of the School of ECE at Georgia Tech and GT-CNRS UMI 2958; Adama Mballo and Yacine Halfaya, of GT-CNRS UMI 2958; and Simon Gautier, of Institut Lafayette, an organization promoting technology transfer from GT-L research labs and transatlantic industrial research and development opportunities in the optoelectronics sector.

Ayari was recognized for his paper, “Van der Waal Epitaxy investigation of GaN-based materials on 2D h-BN by MOVPE for high performance opto-electronic devices.” This work is devoted to a Metalorganic Vapor Phase Epitaxy (MOVPE) growth study of GaN-based materials on 2D h-BN. Supported by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (the French equivalent of the National Science Foundation in the United States), this project aims to demonstrate high performance nitride-based flexible optoelectronics that can be used in LEDs, solar cells, and high-electron-mobility transistors (HEMTs). This research would also have direct applications in flexible displays, wearable sensors, and InGaN-based tandem solar cells.

Ayari’s coauthors on the paper were Ougazzaden; Suresh Sundaram and Jean Paul Salvestrini, of GT-L and GT-CNRS UMI 2958, a lab focusing on research in non-linear optics and dynamics, smart materials, and computer science; Saiful Alam and Paul Voss, of the School of ECE at Georgia Tech and GT-CNRS UMI 2958; Adama Mballo and Yacine Halfaya, of GT-CNRS UMI 2958; and Simon Gautier, of Institut Lafayette, an organization promoting technology transfer from GT-L research labs and transatlantic industrial research and development opportunities in the optoelectronics sector.

A potential strategy to overcome this barrier is to introduce new materials into the transistor structure to enhance their performance and functionalities. And that is the playground of Professor Asif Khan’s group of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “One of the interesting classes of functional materials that we are working on is called antiferroelectric oxides, which could lead to efficient, nanoscale logic and memory devices and devices which can even mimic the functions of biological neurons and synapses,” says Khan. In their recent work published as an Editor’s Pick in the May issue of Applied Physics Letters, they show how these mystery materials—antiferroelectrics—can be fine-tuned by doping, and how their processing techniques can be simplified to ease their entry into conventional micro- and nano-electronic fabrication technologies.

Antiferroelectric materials are electrical insulating in a way very similar to the dielectric materials used in regular capacitors. However, the significant difference is that when a certain voltage is applied across it, it undergoes a phase transition into another  insulating state which is structurally different than the parent one. With appropriate nano-scale engineering, this phenomenon can be the basis for high performance logic transistors and disruptive memory technologies. Interestingly, antiferroelectricity was discovered more than 60 years ago in perovskite materials—yet it did not have a significant impact on the electronics industry despite the attractiveness because perovskites are not compatible with currently used CMOS fabrication processes. What makes the Khan group’s work particularly relevant for transistor applications is that they are studying this phenomenon in Zirconia--a very well-studied non-perovskite binary oxide which has already been in use for more than a decade in the semiconductor industry.

The major contribution of the recent work by Khan’s group is that they significantly simplified the complex process flow of stabilizing the antiferroelectric phase of zirconia. Typically, a metallic capping layer and a high temperature annealing step is required to convert dielectric zirconia into an antiferroelectric state. The group were able to eliminate these process steps through a thoughtful design process of the material stack. Khan is hopeful that this will reduce the barrier to entry of antiferroelectrics into the state-of-the-art semiconductor manufacturing processes for novel device applications. Furthermore, by introducing small amounts of lanthanum into zirconia, the researchers were able to tune the properties of antiferroelectric zirconia, namely critical field/voltage for phase transition, dielectric constant and polarization. “Such tunability can not only enable a large design space for nanoelectronic antiferroelectric devices, but also be useful for their traditional applications of antiferroelectrics in electro-calories, pyroelectrics and micro-actuators,” says Khan. He also mentions that antiferroelectricity is a close cousin of a well-known phenomenon—ferroelectricity, which being researched and adopted by major semiconductor manufacturers for potential memory applications. His previous work also focused on ferroelectric oxides for ultra-low power negative capacitance transistors. However, as he points out, antiferroelectric oxides can do all that ferroelectric oxides can but with much better endurance and reliability and reduced process complexity.

Khan’s group actively collaborated with their industry partner, Eugenus, Inc. located in San Jose, CA. “Our industry-academia partnership is vital for bringing new ideas into the fore-fronts of technology,” says Dr. Mukherjee of Eugenus, Inc., also a co-author of the paper.  “We look forward to further collaboration to assess the applicability and the potential of new material and device concepts.” The Khan group also collaborated with the Charles University at Prague, Czech Republic, on structural characterization of the antiferroelectric zirconia films.

- Christa M. Ernst

“Antiferroelectricity in lanthanum doped zirconia without metallic capping layers and post-deposition/-metallization anneals” is an Editor’s Pick in May’s Applied Physics Letters. You can view the article here. https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5037185

Khan’s work at Georgia Tech is supported in part by the National Science Foundation.

Over the course of five years, this grant program has seeded forty-five projects with forty-nine students working in ten different schools in COE and COS, as well as the Georgia Tech Research Institute and 2 external projects.

The 4 winning projects, from a diverse group of engineering disciplines, were awarded a six-month block of IEN cleanroom and lab access time. In keeping with the interdisciplinary mission of IEN, the projects that will be enabled by the grants include research in materials, biomedicine, energy production, and microelectronics packaging applications.

The Spring 2018 IEN Seed Grant Award winners are:

• Jiang Chen (PI Ben Wang - MSE): Validation and Characterization of Living Cell Grafting on Polycaprolactone Fibers for Textile Tissue Engineering
• Fatima Chrit (PI Alexander Alexeev - ME): Microfluidic Adhesion-based Sorting of Biological Cells
• Zifei Sun (PI Gleb Yushin - MSE): FeOx Coated FeF3-C Nanofibers as Free-standing Cathodes for Sodium- Ion Batteries
• Ting Wang (PI Xing Xie - Civil and Environmental Engineering): Development of Lab-on-a-Chip Devices for the Mechanisms Study of Cell Transportation and Bacteria Inactivation in a Non-Uniform Electric Field

Awardees will present the results of their research efforts at the annual IEN User Day in 2019.

Some novel materials that sound too good to be true turn out to be true and good. An emergent class of semiconductors, which could affordably light up our future with nuanced colors emanating from lasers, lamps, and even window glass, could be the latest example.

These materials are very radiant, easy to process from solution, and energy-efficient. The nagging question of whether hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites (HOIPs) could really work just received a very affirmative answer in a new international study led by physical chemists at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

With significant effort, researchers succeeded in testing an existing HOIP and observed a “richness” of semiconducting physics created by what could be described as electrons dancing on chemical underpinnings that wobble like a funhouse floor in an earthquake. That bucks conventional wisdom because established semiconductors rely upon rigidly stable chemical foundations, that is to say, quieter molecular frameworks, to produce the desired quantum properties.

“We don’t know yet how it works to have these stable quantum properties in this intense molecular motion,” said first author Felix Thouin, a graduate research assistant at Georgia Tech. “It defies physics models we have to try to explain it. It’s like we need some new physics.”

Quantum properties surprise

Their gyrating jumbles have made HOIPs challenging to examine, but the team of researchers from a total of five research institutes in four countries succeeded in measuring a prototypical HOIP and found its quantum properties on par with those of established, molecularly rigid semiconductors, many of which are graphene-based.

“The properties were at least as good as in those materials and may be even better,” said Carlos Silva, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Not all semiconductors also absorb and emit light well, but HOIPs do, making them optoelectronic and thus potentially useful in lasers, LEDs, other lighting applications, and also in photovoltaics.

The lack of molecular-level rigidity in HOIPs also plays into them being more flexibly produced and applied.

Silva co-led the study with physicist Ajay Ram Srimath Kandada. Their team published the results of their study on two-dimensional HOIPs on March 8, 2018, in the journal Physical Review Materials. Their research was funded by EU Horizon 2020, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Fond Québécois pour la Recherche, the Research Council of Canada, and the National Research Foundation of Singapore.

The ‘solution solution’

Commonly, semiconducting properties arise from static crystalline lattices of neatly interconnected atoms. In silicon, for example, which is used in most commercial solar cells, they are interconnected silicon atoms. The same principle applies to graphene-like semiconductors.

“These lattices are structurally not very complex,” Silva said. “They’re only one atom thin, and they have strict two-dimensional properties, so they’re much more rigid.”

“You forcefully limit these systems to two dimensions,” said Srimath Kandada, who is a Marie Curie International Fellow at Georgia Tech and the Italian Institute of Technology. “The atoms are arranged in infinitely expansive, flat sheets, and then these very interesting and desirable optoelectronic properties emerge.”

These proven materials impress. So, why pursue HOIPs, except to explore their baffling physics? Because they may be more practical in important ways.

“One of the compelling advantages is that they’re all made using low-temperature processing from solutions,” Silva said. “It takes much less energy to make them.”

By contrast, graphene-based materials are produced at high temperatures in small amounts that can be tedious to work with. “With this stuff (HOIPs), you can make big batches in solution and coat a whole window with it if you want to,” Silva said.

Funhouse in an earthquake

For all an HOIP’s wobbling, it’s also a very ordered lattice with its own kind of rigidity, though less limiting than in the customary two-dimensional materials.

“It’s not just a single layer,” Srimath Kandada said. “There is a very specific perovskite-like geometry.” Perovskite refers to the shape of an HOIPs crystal lattice, which is a layered scaffolding.

“The lattice self-assembles,” Srimath Kandada said, “and it does so in a three-dimensional stack made of layers of two-dimensional sheets. But HOIPs still preserve those desirable 2D quantum properties.”

Those sheets are held together by interspersed layers of another molecular structure that is a bit like a sheet of rubber bands. That makes the scaffolding wiggle like a funhouse floor.

“At room temperature, the molecules wiggle all over the place. That disrupts the lattice, which is where the electrons live. It’s really intense,” Silva said. “But surprisingly, the quantum properties are still really stable.”

Having quantum properties work at room temperature without requiring ultra-cooling is important for practical use as a semiconductor.

Going back to what HOIP stands for -- hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites – this is how the experimental material fit into the HOIP chemical class: It was a hybrid of inorganic layers of a lead iodide (the rigid part) separated by organic layers (the rubber band-like parts) of phenylethylammonium (chemical formula (PEA)₂PbI₄).

The lead in this prototypical material could be swapped out for a metal safer for humans to handle before the development of an applicable material.

Electron choreography

HOIPs are great semiconductors because their electrons do an acrobatic square dance.

Usually, electrons live in an orbit around the nucleus of an atom or are shared by atoms in a chemical bond. But HOIP chemical lattices, like all semiconductors, are configured to share electrons more broadly.

Energy levels in a system can free the electrons to run around and participate in things like the flow of electricity and heat. The orbits, which are then empty, are called electron holes, and they want the electrons back.

“The hole is thought of as a positive charge, and of course, the electron has a negative charge,” Silva said. “So, hole and electron attract each other.”

The electrons and holes race around each other like dance partners pairing up to what physicists call an “exciton.” Excitons act and look a lot like particles themselves, though they’re not really particles.

Hopping biexciton light

In semiconductors, millions of excitons are correlated, or choreographed, with each other, which makes for desirable properties, when an energy source like electricity or laser light is applied. Additionally, excitons can pair up to form biexcitons, boosting the semiconductor’s energetic properties.

“In this material, we found that the biexciton binding energies were high,” Silva said. “That’s why we want to put this into lasers because the energy you input ends up to 80 or 90 percent as biexcitons.”

Biexcitons bump up energetically to absorb input energy. Then they contract energetically and pump out light. That would work not only in lasers but also in LEDs or other surfaces using the optoelectronic material.

“You can adjust the chemistry (of HOIPs) to control the width between biexciton states, and that controls the wavelength of the light given off,” Silva said. “And the adjustment can be very fine to give you any wavelength of light.”

That translates into any color of light the heart desires.

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ALSO read this materials article: Turbocharging Fuel Cells with a Multifunctional NanoCatalyst

Coauthors of this paper were Stefanie Neutzner and Annamaria Petrozza from the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT); Daniele Cortecchia from IIT and Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore; Cesare Soci from the Centre for Disruptive Photonic Technologies, Singapore; Teddy Salim and Yeng Ming Lam from NTU; and Vlad Dragomir and Richard Leonelli from the University of Montreal. The research was funded by: The EU Horizon 2020’s Curie Fellowship (project 705874); the EU 2020 Research and Innovation Program (Grant #643238 SYNCHRONICS); the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and Fond Québécois pour la Recherche: Nature et Technologies; the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada; and the National Research Foundation of Singapore (NRF-CRP14-2014-03). Any findings and opinions are those of the authors and not necessarily of the funding agencies.

Over the past year, the Center for Advanced Electronics through Machine Learning (CAEML) has gained four new partners. The team of 13 industry members and three universities has expanded both the breadth and depth of its work. CAEML is funded in part by a National Science Foundation program. In the past, CAEML focused on signal integrity and power integrity, but this year, the team has diversified its portfolio with system analysis, chip layout and trusted platform design.

“One of the challenges we face is getting access to data from companies,” said Professor Madhavan Swaminathan, the John Pippin Chair in Microsystems Packaging & Electromagnetics and Director of Center for Co-Design of Chip, Package, System (C3PS) at the Georgia Institute of Technology, a CAEML host. “Most of their data is proprietary, so we’ve come up with several mechanisms to handle it. The processes are working fairly well, but they are more lengthy than we’d like.”

Previously, the group had a sort of coming-out party. It started with backing from nine vendors including Analog Devices, Cadence, Cisco, IBM, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung, and Xilinx. Its initial interest areas included high-speed interconnects, power delivery, system-level electrostatic discharge, IP core reuse, and design rule checking.

After this year, it is clear that the EDA industry is entering its second phase in its use of AI (moving past high-speed interconnects, power delivery etc. and into the realm of machine learning), which the next phase of product development in optimizations that speed turnaround time. Often hindered by current algorithmic limitations.

Researchers are exploring opportunities to replace today’s simulators with AI models (faster) after a reported 40 MHz increase in speed last year. "Relatively slow simulators can lead to timing errors, mistuned analog circuits, and insufficient modeling that results in chip re-spins, said Swaminathan. In addition, machine learning can replace IBIS for behavioral modeling in high-speed interconnects."

Chip researchers are currently combatting the issue with research in data mining, surrogate models, statistical learning, and neural networking models (used by Amazon, Google etc).

“The amount of training data required is high,” said Christopher Cheng of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, another member of the CAEML team. “Classifiers are static, but we want to add the dimension of time using recurrent neural networks to enable time-to-failure labels. We want to extend this work to more parameters and general system failures in the future.”

https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332917

With these computing challenges in mind, the Semiconductor Research Corporation's (SRC) Joint University Microelectronics Program (JUMP), which represents a consortium of industrial participants and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), has established a new $26 million center called the Applications and Systems-driven Center for Energy-Efficient integrated Nano Technologies (ASCENT).

Georgia Tech’s Center for Co-design of Chip, Package System (C3PS) led by Profs. A. Raychowdhury and M. Swaminathan, deputy director and director, respectively, both from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and with support from the Institute of Electronics and Nanotechnology, headed-up Georgia Tech’s winning proposal that resulted in a 5 year, $3.5M award that will fund up to 10 GRA positions.

The multidisciplinary, multi-university center will focus on conducting research that aims to increase the performance, efficiency and capabilities of future computing systems for both commercial and defense applications. By going beyond current industry approaches, such as two dimensional scaling and the addition of performance boosters to complementary metal oxide semiconductors, or CMOS technology, the GT team seeks to provide enhanced performance and energy consumption at lower costs.

Profs. Raychowdhury (PI) and Swaminathan (co-PI) will work in the area of heterogeneous integration, with a focus on the design of high speed die-to-die networks, the incorporation of power, logic, memory and RF components on a common substrate that enables 2.5D and 3D integration.

“Our involvement in the ASCENT center provides us with unique opportunities to partner with the academic and industrial leaders to explore foundational technologies in computing. We will leverage our expertise on high-speed circuit design, device-circuit interactions and advanced packaging to address logic and memory challenges for next-generation computing and communication systems,” said Prof. Raychowdhury, the ON Semiconductor Jr. Associate Professor of VLSI Systems.

“Georgia Tech has always had a long history of working with SRC and we are therefore excited and honored to continue that effort through JUMP,” said Prof. M. Swaminathan, John Pippin Chair in Microsystems Packaging & Electromagnetics and C3PS director. “Through JUMP we plan on expanding our current center capabilities on power delivery, machine learning, multi-physics simulation and system design to include new circuit architectures, power converters, magnetic materials, high frequency components, vertically integrated tools and other platform technologies on a common interconnect fabric.”

This is one of the largest JUMP centers funded by SRC and will work synergistically over the next five years to provide breakthrough technologies.  Other universities involved in the 13-member team include; Notre Dame (lead), Arizona State University, Cornell University, Purdue University, Stanford University, University of Minnesota, University of California-Berkeley, University of California-Los Angeles, University of California-San Diego, University of California-Santa Barbara, University of Colorado, and the University of Texas-Dallas.

- Christa M. Ernst

This nomination recognizes Ougazzaden’s reputation in the field of science and technology and his contributions to the visibility and global reach of the city of Metz, located in the Lorraine Region of France. He received this honor at the monthly meeting of the Academy on December 7, 2017 from its president, Jean-François Muller. The National Academy of Metz was founded in 1757 as the Society for the Study of Sciences and the Arts. In the 19th century, the Academy’s mission became more scientific than literary due to the presence of several engineering and technical schools in Metz. 

In addition to serving as director of Georgia Tech-Lorraine, Ougazzaden leads the Unité Mixte Internationale UMI 2958 GT-CNRS, an international research center with laboratories in both Metz and Atlanta. Cutting-edge research in secure networks and innovative materials has also led to the creation of the Institut Lafayette, where Ougazzaden serves as co-president. Institut Lafayette promotes technology transfer from Georgia Tech-Lorraine’s research laboratories and transatlantic industrial research and development opportunities in the optoelectronics sector.

“I’m looking forward to continuing the upward trajectory of our graduate research and education program here in ECE at Georgia Tech,” Klein said. “In particular, we will aggressively recruit a diverse group of the top graduate school applicants to join our program.”

Klein received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1994, 1995, and 2000, respectively. From 2000-2003, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, working on semiconductor quantum dot-based devices. 

Klein first joined Georgia Tech as an ECE faculty member based at the Georgia Tech-Savannah campus in 2003, and in 2012, he transferred to the Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta. His research involves the theory, modeling, and design of semiconductor optoelectronic devices, including vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers, LEDs, scintillator neutron detectors, and solar cells. This work has been funded by the U.S. Departments of Energy and Commerce, and by industry sponsors, including Canon, Inc.

Klein has served on the program committees for the Optics in the Southeast Conference and the Numerical Simulation of Optoelectronic Devices (NUSOD) Conference, which he co-hosted in 2010. He has served as the chair of the Optics and Photonics Technical Interest Group in the School of ECE since 2011.

Klein has written an online textbook titled Laser Photonics for use in ECE 4751–Laser Theory and Applications. In 2010, he received the Georgia Tech Class of 1940 W. Roane Beard Outstanding Teacher Award. Since 2016, he has been heavily involved in academic assessment activities for ABET and SACS accreditation, and he is a past member of the Institute’s Undergraduate Curriculum Committee.   

While at the Georgia Tech-Savannah campus, Klein was the faculty advisor of the IEEE student branch. Since coming to Atlanta, he has been involved in community outreach to elementary and middle school teachers in the Gwinnett County School System through a CEISMC program, and he has been involved in ECE's H.O.T. Days summer program with local high school students. Finally, Klein has a lovely singing voice, which he occasionally showcases at local karaoke establishments.

With billions of connected devices, and several more billions to come in the next few years, the opportunities are endless.  With such a dramatic growth, the devices need to be low-cost, preferably self-powered, low power-consuming, wirelessly connectible, reliable, mass producible, customizable, easily accessible and usable, lightweight, and also be able to conform to the surface of the object to which they are attached.  This conformality then drives the need for flexible electronics, changing the world of electronics from one of being flat and stiff to one which is bendable and stretchable. This paradigm shift in electronics, driven by the shape of things-to come drives the need for Flexible Hybrid Electronics (FHE).

With these grand challenges in mind, Prof. Suresh Sitaraman from the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN) , Georgia Tech hosted, in conjunction with NextFlex, the Flexible Hybrid Electronics Manufacturing Innovation Institute, a workshop that focused on expert presentations of state-of-the-art, along with the  defining a technical roadmap targeting on the power aspects of FHE device, called “Powering the Internet of Everything”.

The workshop, attended by nearly 90 Government, Industry, and Academic experts was held in the Marcus Nanotechnology Building on November 6 – 8, 2017. The three-day event included invited talks, roadmapping, a student technical poster session, and guided tours of principal research and shared user laboratories where FHE related research, micro/nano fabrication and microanalysis occur on the GT campus. Labs visited included mechanical and electrical testing, modeling and characterization; additive and 3D printing; device packaging; soft robotics and exoskeleton; organic photonics and electronics; and the IEN micro/nano fabrication and microscopy laboratories, to name a few. Workshop attendees were able to get up a close up view to the interesting FHE projects in which students and faculty are engaged. At each stop in the tour students demonstrated their work and answered questions about their programs, from flexible batteries for IOT to robotic human augmentation exoskeletons, FHE-enabled wearables and human-machine interfaces, and more.  Of greatest interest to the participants were those technologies that had already been demonstrated in the GT labs and which are ready for prototyping and pilot scale manufacturing.

Technical sessions included; Power and Energy Systems Needs, Energy Harvesting Strategies, Energy Storage Strategies, Power Management Strategies, and Ultra-Low Power Electronics/Sensors. Speakers were drawn from both government and private sectors, as well as academia. Speakers included participation from AT&T, IBM, NIH, Naval Surface Warfare Center, the Office of Naval Research, PARC, Silniva, Air Force Research Lab, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Blue Spark Technologies, Analog Devices, Texas Instruments, and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Following the technical sessions, the Marcus Nanotechnology Building Atrium space filled to capacity for an evening reception and competitive student poster and demo session. With over 35 FHE projects on display, the judging team consisting of industry and government experts was challenged with determining the best posters based on the content, clarity and organization, and overall presentation. After the scores were tallied, it was announced that there was a three-way tie for first place, a second place winner, and a tie for third, with all of them winning monetary awards.

Below is a list of the winning poster titles and authors:

Tied for 1^st

“Toward all-soft and fully-integrated microsystems: vertically integrated physical and chemical microsystems using gallium-based liquid metal and soft lithography”, Min-gu Kim and Prof. Oliver Brand

“Novel Architectures for Polymer Thermoelectric Devices for Energy Harvesting”, Akanksha Menon, Kiarash Gordiz, and Prof. Shannon Yee

“Soft, Fluidic Modulation of Skin Temperature”, Donald J. Ward, Nil Z. Gurel, Prof. Omer T. Inan, and Frank L. Hammond

2^nd Place

“Self-powered Wide-frequency Flexible Triboelectric (SWIFT) Microphone”, N. Arora, S. L. Zhang, M. Gupta, F. Shahmiri, D. Osorio, Y. Wang, Z. Wang, C. Zhang, T. Starner, B. Boots, ZL Wang, G. D. Abowd

Tied for 3^rd

“Mm-wave Ultra-Long-Range Energy-Autonomous Printed RFID      Van-Atta Wireless Gas Sensors: at the Crossroads of 5G and IoT”, Jimmy Hester and Prof. Manos Tentzeris

“Sensorized Pneumatic Muscles for Force and Stiffness Control”, Lucas O. Tiziani, Thomas W. Cahoon, and Frank L. Hammond III

About FHE at Georgia Tech:
Led by Prof. Suresh Sitaraman, the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, more than 30  researchers at Georgia Tech are involved in projects involving flexible electronics from the School of Mechanical Engineering, the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the School of Materials Science and Engineering, the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering, the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. Several interdisciplinary research institutes at Georgia Tech are also involved in the projects, including the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology, Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute, and the Institute for Materials.  The Office of Industry Collaboration and the College of Engineering are also actively engaged.

About NextFlex:
Formed in 2015 through a cooperative agreement between the US Department of Defense (DoD) and FlexTech Alliance, NextFlex is a consortium of companies, academic institutions, non-profits and state, local and federal governments with a shared goal of advancing U.S. Manufacturing of FHE. By adding electronics to new and unique materials that are part of our everyday lives in conjunction with the power of silicon ICs to create conformable and stretchable smart products, FHE is ushering in an era of “electronics on everything” and advancing the efficiency of our world.

- Christa M. Ernst
  {christa.ernst@ien.gatech.edu}

The 4 winning projects, from a diverse group of engineering disciplines, were awarded a six-month block of IEN cleanroom and lab access time. In keeping with the interdisciplinary mission of IEN, the projects that will be enabled by the grants include research in materials, biomedicine, energy production, and microelectronics packaging applications.

The Fall 2017 IEN Seed Grant Award winners are:

• Saswat Mishra (PI Woon-Hong Yeo, Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering), Stretchable Hybrid Electronics for Wireless Monitoring of Salivary Electrolytes Assays
• Arith Rajapakse (PI Anna Erickson, Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering), Ionizing Radiation Detection Using a Vertically Aligned Carbon Nanotube Array Transistor
• Nujhat Tasneem (PI Asif Khan, Electrical and Computer Engineering), Co-integration of Logic and Non-volatile Memory in Front-End-of-the-Line (FEOL) Processes
• Congshan Wan (PI Muhannad Bakir and Tom Gaylord, Electrical and Computer Engineering), First Circular Waveguide Grating-Via-Grating for Interlayer Optical Coupling

Awardees will present the results of their research efforts at the annual IEN User Day in 2018.

For more information about IEN cleanroom facilities, research capabilities, and collaboration opportunities please visit www.ien.gatech.edu.

This fellowship provides funding for one recent or soon to be Bachelor of Science Georgia Tech undergraduate to pursue a one-year Master's degree program at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and one St. Andrews student to pursue a one-year Master's degree program at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Recipients will each receive $35,000 to help cover tuition, fees, and living expenses while enrolled at St. Andrews and Georgia Tech.

The Bobby Jones Fellowship is more than an academic sojourn. Above all it is an ambassadorship, rewarding its beneficiary for his/her exemplary citizenship and requiring him/her to exert him/herself while abroad as an active and energetic representative of his/her university and country.

This fellowship is open to Physics and ECE seniors that will be graduating in May or August 2018. However, Physics and ECE students who will be graduating in the near future, are encouraged to consider this opportunity for the future.

The deadline for applications is Wednesday, November 1, 2017 and you can find more information by going here: http://oie.gatech.edu/scholarships/bobby-jones. 

Award Information
Each seed grant award will consist of free cleanroom access to the student identified in the proposal for 2 (consecutive) billing quarters. Based on current access rates and the academic cap on hourly charges (https://cleanroom.ien.gatech.edu/rates/), this comprises a maximum award of $6000 for the 6 month period. This maximum award amount is still in effect even if IEN non-cleanroom (lab) equipment, electron beam lithography (EBL), or tools in the Materials Characterization Facility (MCF) are required. The designated student user is expected to only utilize the cleanroom/tool access while working with the PI on the proposed project. Members of the IEN processing staff will be available to consult during the project period. The number of awards for each proposal submission date will depend on the number and quality of the proposals. A short report describing the research activities is required midway and at the completion of the award period.

Submission Schedule
This Seed Grant program is offered in two competitions each year with due dates on October 1, 2017 and April 1, 2018. While it is expected that research activity will begin on December 1, 2017 and June 1, 2017, respectively, there is flexibility in scheduling the 2 quarters of research work, as long as they conform to the IEN billing quarters.

Proposal Requirements (2 pages max)
The proposal (submitted as a PDF file of no more than 2 pages) should do the following:
1. Provide a project title.
2. Identify the research problem and specify the proposed methods.
3. Indicate the IEN research tools necessary to conduct the research. If assistance is needed with this component, staff members of the IEN are available for consultation.
4. Describe the relationship of this research to the PI’s other research activity.
5. Identify the PI and the graduate student involved (including year of graduate work), and if there will be a mentoring relationship with the PI’s other students. Note if there are collaborative relationships with Georgia Tech faculty that bear on this research project.
6. Specify the potential for follow-on funding based on the results of this initial work.

Submit the PDF file by the specified due date to Ms. Amy Duke (amy.duke@ien.gatech.edu).

Review Criteria
Proposals will initially be reviewed by IEN staff for technical feasibility within the 6-month time frame. Rating of proposals will be done by a review committee of Georgia Tech faculty, with final selection of awardees by IEN staff. Review criteria include novelty of the research, clarity of the proposed work, work that is technically achievable within the time constraints, and likelihood of positive outcomes (funding).

For more information, please contact Dr. David Gottfried, dsgottfried@gatech.edu, (404) 894-0479.

An assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) since 2014, Sarioglu leads the Biomedical Microsystems Laboratory. He will use his award to develop a radical lab-on-a-chip technology with integrated electronic readout to analyze heterogeneous cell populations. Lab-on-a-chip systems are microfluidic devices that analyze small volumes of biological samples in a compact-footprint, with minimal cost and with the ultimate goal of replacing centralized laboratories. However, lab-on-a-chip devices typically lack an on-chip readout mechanism, and therefore, require microscopy or other benchtop instruments for quantitative results, negating their cost and size advantages.

Sarioglu’s research combines two traditionally distant technical disciplines, microfluidics and telecommunications, to integrate a low-cost, scalable electronic sensor network into lab-on-a-chip devices. Specifically, he uses code-division multiplexing employed in CDMA telecommunication networks to develop a network of biosensors for quantitatively monitoring bioanalytical processes in a microfluidic device. Given the need for disposable, quantitative biomedical assays, Sarioglu's research, enabled by this award, will have wide-ranging applications from basic biology research to point-of-care diagnostics.



The Beckman Young Investigator (BYI) Program provides research support to the most promising young faculty members in the early stages of their academic careers in the chemical and life sciences, particularly to foster the invention of methods, instruments, and materials that will open up new avenues of research in science. Projects supported by the BYI program are truly innovative, high-risk, and show promise for contributing to significant advances in chemistry and the life sciences. They represent a departure from current research directions rather than an extension or expansion of existing programs. The 2017 BYI Awardees were selected from a pool of over 300 applicants after a three-part review led by a panel of scientific experts.

The remainder of the events centered around the theme “Micro/Nano-Enabled Electronics for Global Challenges” and featured topical lecture sessions with prominent Georgia Tech faculty speakers, facility tours, and a student poster session.

IEN congratulates the four winners of the session for their excellent presentations.

Potentiometric Biosensing for Rapid, On-Site Disease Diagnostics - Eleanor Brightbill (MSE), Eleanor Brightbill graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a B.S. in Chemistry before beginning her Ph.D. work in Materials Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech.  As a member of the Vogel Lab, Eleanor is researching field-effect transistor-based potentiometric biosensing, specifically for serological disease detection. 

Enabling the Next Generation of Ultrafast Integrated Optical Links - Amir Hosseinnia (ECE), Amir H. Hosseinnia is an ECE PhD candidate and research assistant with the Photonics Research Group (PRG) at Georgia Institute of Technology. During his PhD, he has been working on the design, fabrication and characterization of integrated nanophotonic devices, systems, and platforms. He has successfully developed various heterogeneous material platforms to realize ultra-low-loss, high-speed and high-efficiency integrated devices. His efforts to demonstrate high quality micro-resonators, high-efficiency interlayer couplers, and high-speed modulators on hybrid platforms has paved the path to realize the next generation of silicon photonic systems and devices, which he is working on.

His research interests include the design, optimization, and fabrication of integrated photonic devices, heterogenous optical platforms and novel optical materials. He also serves as the president of OSA Student Chapter at GT aimed to boost the science of optics through various events and conferences.

Ultra-Low Programming Voltage and Time Flash Memory Devices Using CVD Graphene - Ramy Nashed (ECE), Ramy Nashed received the B.Sc. degree in electronics engineering from Loughborough University, U.K., in 2010, and the M.Sc. degree in electronics engineering from American University in Cairo, Egypt, in 2013. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering with Georgia Tech, USA. His research interests include the design, fabrication, and characterization of post-CMOS devices and interconnects. He recently joined Intel Corporation, Hillsboro, USA, as an Intern to study the reliability of the 14 nm-node FinFET transistors."

A Low Temperature Sacrificial Layer Based CMUT Fabrication Process for Improved Reliability - Amirabbas Pirouz (ECE), Amirabbas Pirouz was born in Amol, Mazandaran, Iran, in 1989. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran in 2012. He has completed an M.S. degree in 2015 and is continuing to pursue a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Georgia institute of Technology. His current research interests are in designing, modeling, fabricating, and characterizing capacitive micromachined ultrasound transducers (CMUTs) for catheter based CMUT imaging devices and especially intracardiac-echocardiography (ICE).

With the beginning of funding for SENIC,  the IEN seed grant program was extended to include non-Georgia Tech students and PI’s for award consideration. This award session is the second in which an off-campus research project was chosen for inclusion.

The 5 winning projects, from a diverse group of engineering disciplines, were awarded a six-month block of IEN cleanroom and lab access time. In keeping with the interdisciplinary mission of IEN, the projects that will be enabled by the grants include research in materials, biomedicine, energy, and electronics applications.

The Spring 2017 IEN Seed Grant Award winners are:

• Michael Griffin (PI David Ku, Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering), Investigation of 3D Lithography Methods: Applications to High Shear Microfluidic Thrombosis Assays
• Imran Hossain (PI Prabhu Arumugam, Louisiana Tech - Mechanical Engineering), Development of a Novel Electrochemical Microarray to Monitor Brain Aging Biomarkers
• Colby Lewallen & Tim Lee (PI Craig Forest, Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering), Development of Substrates for High-Throughput Neuro-Anatomical Circuit Reconstruction
• Darshit Patel (PI Billyde Brown, Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute), 3D Microsupercapacitors for On-Chip Integration with Emerging Electronics
• Yutong Wu (PI Nian Liu, Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering), In-Electrolyte Microscale Probing of Electrochemical Reactions and Processes

Awardees will present the results of their research efforts at the annual IEN User Day in 2018.

For more information about IEN cleanroom facilities, research capabilities, and collaboration opportunities please visit www.ien.gatech.edu.

Lourenco’s thesis is entitled “Mitigation of Transient Radiation Effects in Advanced Silicon-Germanium Technologies.” The need for low-cost electronics in extreme environment applications, such as in-orbit and interplanetary spacecraft, has brought silicon-germanium (SiGe) technologies into the spotlight, but the viable long-term capability of these semiconductor platforms in radiation-intense environments remains largely unexplored. Conventional design methodologies for radiation-hardened electronics rely on multiple system redundancies and metallic shielding, but these solutions come at severe size, weight, and cost penalties. The objective of this thesis is to explore the mechanisms of radiation effects within modern SiGe technologies and develop novel, low-overhead techniques for mitigating radiation-induced damage within these silicon-based platforms. Advised by ECE Professor John D. Cressler, Lourenco graduated in May 2016 and is now a research engineer II at the Georgia Tech Research Institute’s Advanced Concepts Laboratory in Atlanta.

Pourabolghasem’s thesis is entitled “Pillar-based Phononic Crystal Structures for High-frequency Applications.” In this thesis, a novel high-frequency signal processing platform is developed by harnessing the propagation of acoustic waves using a composite material structure known as pillar-based phononic crystals (PnCs). A major property of PnCs is their ability to stop acoustic waves within certain frequency ranges known as bandgaps. In this work, the theoretical origins of bandgap formation in the pillar-based PnCs is studied and the existence of such bandgaps and other wave-manipulating devices, such as waveguides, in the ultra high-frequency range is experimentally demonstrated. Considering the significance of fast signal processing platforms in telecommunications applications, the findings in this thesis open a new avenue in developing functional devices using PnC structures for such applications. Advised by ECE Professor Ali Adibi, Pourabolghasem graduated in May 2016 and is a data scientist with Electronic Arts in Redwood City, California.

Temel’s thesis is entitled “Understanding Perceived Quality through Visual Representations.” His research is focused on understanding the human vision system to design algorithms that perceive the world as humans do. Specially, he worked on understanding and measuring perceived quality. Temel is one of the very few, if any, in the community who possesses a strong understanding of the subject with thorough comprehension of the various directions the community has followed over the years. This unique understanding has a great potential of producing new paradigms that can affect our daily lives, including but not limited to, sharing higher quality images and videos with less data in apps like Snapchat or Facebook, having a better quality of experience while watching Netflix or YouTube, and enabling more reliable driving assistance and tele-medicine systems that can increase the quality of life for all of us. Advised by ECE Professor Ghassan AlRegib, Temel graduated in December 2016 and is a postdoctoral fellow in the Multimedia and Sensors Lab in the Georgia Tech School of ECE in Atlanta.

Program Eligibility

Georgia Tech Applicants
This program is open to any current Georgia Tech or GTRI faculty member as project PI. The graduate student performing the research should be in the first 2 years of his/her graduate studies, and preference will be given to students who are new users of the IEN facilities. The student’s research advisor (project PI) does not need to be a current user of the IEN cleanroom/lab facilities.

External (non-Georgia Tech) Applicants
Recent funding from the NSF to create the Southeastern Nanotechnology Infrastructure Corridor,SENIC (http://senic.gatech.edu/) as part of the NNCI has allowed IEN to open this program to external (not affiliated with Georgia Tech) users currently at an academic institution in the southeastern US. The graduate student performing the proposed research cannot be a current user of the IEN facilities. The student’s research advisor (project PI) may have a current project in place for use of the IEN cleanroom/lab facilities, but this is not a requirement. If awarded, a specialized service agreement will need to be arranged with the user’s home institution. Past awardees of a seed grant may submit additional proposals for different students/projects, but not in consecutive funding cycles. It is the responsibility of the project PI and student to determine their ability to make use of the awarded time during the grant period. Extensions requested once the project has begun will not be granted.

Award Information
Each seed grant award will consist of free cleanroom access to the student identified in the proposal for 2 (consecutive) billing quarters. Based on current access rates and the academic cap on hourly charges (https://cleanroom.ien.gatech.edu/rates/), this comprises a maximum award of $6000 for the 6 month period. This maximum award amount is still in effect even if IEN non-cleanroom (lab) equipment, electron beam lithography (EBL), or tools in the Materials Characterization Facility (MCF) are required. The designated student user is expected to only utilize the cleanroom/tool access while working with the PI on the proposed project. Members of the IEN processing staff will be available to consult during the project period. The number of awards for each proposal submission date will depend on the number and quality of the proposals. A short report describing the research activities is required midway and at the completion of the award period.

Submission Schedule
This Seed Grant program is offered in two competitions each year with due dates on April 1 and October 1. While it is expected that research activity will begin on June 1 and December respectively, there is flexibility in scheduling the 2 quarters of research work, as long as they conform to the IEN billing quarters.

Proposal Requirements (2 pages max)
The proposal (submitted as a PDF file of no more than 2 pages) should do the following:

1. Provide a project title.
2. Identify the research problem and specify the proposed methods.
3. Indicate the IEN research tools necessary to conduct the research. If assistance is needed with this component, staff members of the IEN are available for consultation.
4. Describe the relationship of this research to the PI’s other research activity.
5. Identify the PI and the graduate student involved (including year of graduate work), and if there will be a mentoring relationship with the PI’s other students. Note if there are collaborative relationships with Georgia Tech faculty that bear on this research project.
6. Specify the potential for follow-on funding based on the results of this initial work.

Submit the PDF file by the specified due date to Ms. Amy  Duke (amy.duke@ien.gatech.edu).

Review Criteria
Proposals will initially be reviewed by IEN staff for technical feasibility within the 6-month time frame.Rating of proposals will be done by a review committee of Georgia Tech faculty, with final selection of awardees by IEN staff.

For more information, please contact Dr. David Gottfried, dsgottfried@gatech.edu, (404)894-0479.

- Christa M. Ernst

Compressive sensing was devised to sample a sparse signal below the Nyquist-Shannon limit, but nonetheless to permit its faithful reconstruction, and thus to store and transmit sparse signals in a very efficient fashion. Compressive sensing relies on having at hand large strings of random (or sufficiently random-looking) numbers to populate the compression matrix needed to compress the data. Such strings of pseudo-random numbers are typically generated on a digital computer. Nevertheless, for the ultimate in high speed and simplicity, it is desirable to generate the string of random-like numbers, and ultimately carry out the compression itself, not only at speeds not readily attained
on a conventional computer, but also physically. The authors have used a chaotic optical signal produced by an external-cavity semiconductor laser to generate sufficiently random-like numbers at very high rate, based on the sub-100 picosecond timescale determining the dynamics of the laser.  The team demonstrated efficient compression flowed by high-fidelity reconstruction of images using this technique. According to Citrin, "This work is exciting as it opens the way to ultrahigh-speed compression of sparse signals--and we hope soon in a way to be carried out in the physical layer."

Beginning in 2016, after several successful years of the program, the IEN seed grant application was extended include non-Georgia Tech students and PI’s for award consideration. This award session is the first in which an off-campus research project was chosen for inclusion.

The 5 winning projects, from a diverse group of engineering disciplines, were awarded a six-month block of IEN cleanroom and lab access time. In keeping with the interdisciplinary mission of IEN, the projects that will be enabled by the grants include research in materials, biomedicine, energy production, and microelectronics packaging applications.

• Francisco Quintero Cortes (PI Matthew McDowell, Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science and Engineering), Controlling Interfaces in Ceramic Ion Conductors for Next-Generation Lithium Batteries
• Blaine Costello (PI Jeff Davis, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering), Dielectric Interfacial Capacitive Energy Storage (DICES) Experiments
• Connor Howe (PI W. Hong Yeo, Virginia Commonwealth Univ. – School of Engineering and Medicine), Microstructured Flow Sensing System Integrated with a Thin Film Nitonol Stent
• Aravindh Rajan & Patrick Creamer (PI Shannon Yee, Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering), Creating Thermionic Devices and Thermal Rectifiers
• Alexandra Tsoras (PI Julie Champion, Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering), Engineering S-layer Autotransporter Protein Nanoparticles for Rickettsia Applications

Awardees will present the results of their research efforts at the annual IEN User Day in 2017.

For more information about IEN cleanroom facilities, research capabilities, and collaboration opportunities please visit www.ien.gatech.edu.

- Christa M. Ernst

In real time, large molecules interact in nanosecond speed, practically instantaneously, making them nearly impossible to watch. But scientists are a step closer to being able to observe their moves -- play-by-play -- thanks to novel fine-tuning of an atomic scale instrument by engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The advancement could someday help researchers figure out why some drugs work well and others less so, and measure details about the workings of life at their root.

Atomic forces seen clearly

The improvement works by carefully adding electronic white noise to a sensing probe inside an atomic force microscope (AFM), which is already sensitive enough to detect forces exerted by interacting molecules, such as protein receptors and vitamins. But even with those abilities at a nanometer scale, in a slight but significant way, AFM can be a blunt instrument.

“There’s an inability of the probe to sample the deepest part of the interaction,” said researcher Todd Sulchek, an associate professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Mechanical Engineering. “You either see how these molecules are bound together or unbound. It was either black or white, but now we’re succeeding at getting varying shades of gray.”

Sulchek and graduate researchers Ahmad Haider and Daniel Potter published the results of their engineering solution in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition the week of November 21, 2016. Their research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Cone wiggling a cantilever

Molecules have tractor beams, albeit weak ones. They tug at each other with an array of faint forces, such as van der Waals interactions, mostly generated though negative or positive polarities spread around the molecules.

Atomic force microscopes measure those attracting energies by sticking a nanoscale cone-shaped probe close to the molecules to feel the forces out as they interact. The cone is attached to a cantilever, a flexible tiny stick, and makes it wiggle, as the atomic forces tug the cone this way or that.

The cantilever transfers the quivering into the microscope, which turns it into a usable signal much the way the needle of a turntable transfers vibrations from a record to be converted into sound. The resulting signal illustrates what is called an energy well. The top of the well is the point where the adhesive forces are about to take hold, and the bottom is a point about where the molecules meet.

Falling into the energy well

But as the forces pull the cone and the molecules it’s observing closer to each other, at some point, they basically jerk together, preventing a detailed measurement of the gradient of energy. As a result, as the cone approaches the interacting molecules, researchers see the top of the energy well and the end of the interaction, but the details of the well’s walls, particularly deep down where the molecules most closely interact, invariably elude them.

“The way we got around it was, we simply added some electronic noise in a well-defined manner, and that allowed the probe to feel the interaction when it was still relatively far away from the surface of the molecules,” Sulchek said. The electronic vibration, called enhanced stochastic fluctuation, also diluted the effect of the adhesive forces that otherwise would have snatched the cantilever and molecules together.

“What I think is neat is that it’s counterintuitive, because you usually try to eliminate noise from your system to get more accurate measurements, but we’re adding noise,” Sulchek said. The improvement gets around potential bias produced by the addition of noise by allowing researchers to take more samples and longer ones, effectively cancelling the effects of the noise in the overall data.

Adding some noise may sound simple, but it took Haider and Potter a good two years to figure out how it could work and to make tedious adjustments to the instrumentation.

Bacterial vise grip ballet

The researchers used interactions between the cantilever and a material called mica to finish developing the improvement. Mica has a predictable shape and charge, good for benchmarking – it’s very smooth. “Mica is atomically flat,” Sulchek said. “That and graphite are about the two flattest surfaces that you can construct.”

Now, Sulchek’s team is testing the improved cantilever in a biological scenario -- a protein from Streptomyces avidinii bacteria, which eats up the vitamin biotin with a vengeance. The protein, streptavidin, binds with biotin so tightly, that researchers commonly use it to study molecular adhesion.

“It’s the strongest bio-interaction known to science,” Sulchek said. Streptavidin’s vise grip makes for a well standardized test case for the newly fine-tuned device.  “A flap opens up and the biotin fits in it like a glove,” Sulchek said. “We want to see if we can watch how that happens and measure its energy well.”

Cancer, AIDS, autoimmune disease

That puts Sulchek closer to his dream of an instrument to boost experimental biomolecular research, and potentially lead to insights useful to medicine. “I want to have a tool to visualize these intermediate steps,” he said. “I want a tool to see those short-lived states."

Researchers could use such an improved tool to better understand autoimmune disorders, immunotherapy to treat cancer or the ability of HIV to thwart an antibody defense.

“Many antibodies have two binding sites, and there’s a reason for that, but we don’t yet understand why,” Sulchek said. “We do know that you don’t want antibodies to interact too strongly.” When they do, it can result in autoimmune diseases.

“There’s a lot of therapeutics involving antibodies, and some work well; others don’t work well,” Sulchek said. Antibodies may not attach optimally to HIV, for example, because they’re having a hard time wrapping around the virus.

Capturing the clumsy action in extreme slow motion could someday help biomedical researchers design a more effective antibody to further foil the virus.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation (grant CBET-CAREER-1055437). Findings and opinions in this article are those of the scientists and authors and not of the funding agency.

READ: Tiny mirror makes microscope see cells in 3D

Biomedical engineers from Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology have devised a microfluidic testing ground where platelets can demonstrate their strength by squeezing two protein dots together. Imagine rows and rows of strength testing machines from a carnival, but very tiny. A platelet is capable of exerting forces that are several times larger, in relation to its size, than a muscle cells.

After a blood clot forms, it contracts, promoting wound closure and restoration of normal blood flow. This process can be deficient in a variety of blood clotting disorders. Previously, it was difficult to measure an individual platelet’s contributions to contraction, because clots’ various components got in the way.

The prototype diagnostic tools were described in Nature Materials in a paper published on Monday, October 10, 2016. The research was supported with funding from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute and the National Science Foundation.

"We discovered that platelets from some patients with bleeding disorders are ‘wimpier’ than platelets from healthy people," says Wilbur Lam, an assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine and in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. "Our device may function as a new physics-based method to test for bleeding disorders, complementary to current methods."

The first author of the paper is David Myers, an instructor at Emory's medical school. Lam is also a physician in the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. 

The scientists infer how strong or wimpy someone’s platelets are by measuring how far the protein dots move, taking a picture of the rows of dots, and then analyzing the picture on a computer.

The dots are made of fibrinogen, a sticky protein that is the precursor for fibrin, which forms a mesh of insoluble strands in a blood clot.

In addition to detecting problems with platelet contraction in patients with known inherited disorders such as Wiskott Aldrich syndrome, Myers, Lam and colleagues could also see differences in some patients who had bleeding symptoms, but who performed normally on standard diagnostic tests.

The researchers also used chemical tools to dissect the process of platelet contraction. They showed that inhibitors of Rho/ROCK enzymes shut down platelet contraction, but inhibitors of a related pathway, MLCK (myosin light chain kinase), did not. Individual platelet contraction could become an assay for development or refinement of blood thinning drugs, Lam says.

Yongzhi Qiu, Meredith Fay, Yumiko Sakurai, Jong Baek, Reginald Tran, Jordan C. Ciciliano, Byungwook Ahn, Robert Mannino of Georgia Tech and Emory; Alberto Fernandez-Nieves, Michael Tennenbaum, Jonas Cuadrado and Todd Sulchek of Georgia Tech; Carolyn Bennett, Silvia Bunting and Michael Briones of Emory coauthored the paper. Daniel Chester and Ashley Brown from North Carolina State University contributed to testing the device.The research was supported with funding from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (grants R01HL121264, U54HL112309) and a National Science Foundation CAREER award (grant 1150235).

The proliferation of mobile devices, feeding the data to the cloud, has resulted in an unprecedented increase in global data traffic; projected to double to about six Exabytes (10¹⁸) per day by 2020. Electrical interconnects are limited for many reasons including device leakage, propagation delay, signal-to-signal crosstalk, reflection and others. Optical interconnects are immune to these and being photonic-based, are capable of meeting the above high bandwidth requirements. Unlike in long-distance telecommunications, short-distance bandwidth requires careful balance between performance, power and cost.

Silicon photonics and board-level optoelectronics are being intensely explored by the industry. Silicon photonics promises the highest potential by combining photonics and electronics onto a single die, using CMOS-compatible processes. Board-level optoelectronics, on the other hand, utilize low-cost board substrate process technologies to create Optical Printed Circuit Boards (O-PCB).

In contrast to these above approaches, Georgia Tech proposed and developed a very innovative 3D glass photonics (3DGP) technology, not at device or board-level, as with silicon and board-level photonics, but at package-level. It is a lower cost and low power alternative to silicon photonics and board-level optoelectronics. In addition, it is a 3D concept using glass with an ultra-short photonic via interconnection. Glass offers a unique combination of optical, electrical, thermo-mechanical and dimensional-stability properties for precision alignments, and large-area panel processability for low cost, unmatched by other materials. Optically, the refractive index of glass can match that of glass optical fibers to enable low-loss light coupling. Electrically, the low-loss tangent of glass is far superior to that of silicon. Mechanically, the Coefficient of Thermal Expansion (CTE) of glass matches silicon and other devices, thus improving the system-level reliability. The low surface roughness and high dimensional stability of glass is capable of 1µm and below features similar to back end of line (BEOL) silicon processes, for high interconnect density and precise coupling to optical fibers. Lastly, glass has the potential for low cost by virtue of large panel manufacturing

Recently, Georgia Tech’s 3DGP program demonstrated a 400 Gbps optical transceiver module. This test vehicle featured optimized electrical interconnects at < 0.1 dB/mm insertion loss, thermal interconnects to keep laser temperature under 80ºC, and novel optical interconnections comprising of planar optical waveguides, 3D vertical optical vias, 45º turning mirrors, and fiber alignment grooves in glass. These novel optical interconnections resulted in < 2 dB coupling loss with high-density out-of-plane turning, and alignment tolerance on par with fiber-to-fiber coupling.

The Georgia Tech industry consortium is unique in the academic world. It involves partnership with end-user and supply chain companies, resulting in accelerated 3DGP technology development. The end-users include TE Connectivity and Ciena Corp.; and supply chain companies include Corning Glass, Asahi Glass, and Schott Glass for supplying the ultra-thin glass panels with vias or cavities; Dow-Chemical for polymers; Ushio for placing a lithographic tool at Georgia Tech to enable micro-mirror formation; Atotech for supplying the chemistry for advanced metallization processes; Microchem for supplying optical polymers; and DISCO for placing a dicing tool at Georgia Tech to enable fiber alignment groove formation.

About the Authors

Bruce Chou, is graduating in Fall 2016 with his PhD under the advisement of Prof. Rao Tummala. His research focus is on Design and Demonstration of 3D Glass Photonics. cchou36@gatech.edu.

Prof. Rao Tummala is Joseph. M. Pettit Chair Professor in ECE and MSE and Director of Georgia Tech’s Packaging Research Center. rao.tummala@ece.gatech.edu.

Dr. Fuhan Liu is a Research Professor and Program Manager of Glass Photonics Program at GT PRC fuhan.liu@ece.gatech.edu.

Dr. Venky Sundaram is a Research Professor and Associate Director of Industry Programs at GT PRC vs24@mail.gatech.edu. 

As a member of the NNCI program, the Georgia Institute of Technology formed a collaboration with the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering, an academic collaboration between North Carolina A&T State University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, to  form the Southeastern Nanotechnology Infrastructure Corridor (SENIC) and provide SE region users with leading-edge fabrication and characterization tools, instrumentation and expertise within all disciplines of nanoscale science, engineering and technology.

SUIN (SENIC Undergraduate Internship in Nanotechnology) is a major component of the SENIC program and focuses on providing undergraduates in engineering the chance to spend a summer conducting research in a world-class collaborative lab with prominent Georgia Tech researchers. GT-IEN hosted 6 undergraduates from various U.S. colleges over the summer that engaged in hands-on research in a number of fields of nanotechnology. At the conclusion of the program, the students had the opportunity to present their findings at the SURE Research Symposium on July the 28th, 2016.  

Over the months of the Fall Semester we will be highlighting each of the six REU participants, their research topics and experience in the labs, as well as what they gained from the program and their time at Georgia Tech, and in Atlanta.

• Undergraduate: Michael VanderZwaag PI: Kim Kurtis, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Mentors: Bill Jin & Behnaz Zaribaf, Topic: Titanium Dioxide Nanoparticles in Concrete
• Undergraduate: Elizabeth Tom, PI: Michael Filler, School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Mentor: Dmitriy Boyuk, Topic: Hybrid Nanowire Coating
• Undergraduate: John Nance, PI: Peter Hesketh, School of Mechanical Engineering, Mentor: Srinivas Gowranga Hanasoge, Topic: Fabrication of Artificial Cilia
• Undergraduate: Cooper Thome: PI: Elsa Reichmanis, School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Mentor: Bailey Risteen, Topic: Cellulose Nanocrystals & Conductivity
• Undergraduate: Yaneira Gonzalez, PI: Yuanzhi Tang, School of Earth and Environmental Science, Mentors: Rixiang Huang & Shiliang Zhao, Topic: Effects of zinc metal on magnesium oxides               
• Undergraduate: Thomas Metke, PI: Todd Sulchek, School of Mechanical Engineering, Mentor: Muhynmin Islam, Topic: Micofluidics for Cell Stiffness

Look for our monthly news releases online at ien.gatech.edu, or subscribe to our mailing list at this web address.

For more information on the SENIC REU Program, contact Program Manager Leslie O’Neill [leslie.oneill@ien.gatech.edu] for more information on SENIC Education and Outreach, contact Program Director Dr. Nancy [nancy.healy@ien.gatech.edu].

As an I/UCRC, CAEML will collaborate closely with companies, who will help evaluate and select projects. The corporate connections will help researchers better understand the real-world problems faced by manufacturers and provide a pipeline of ideas between academia and industry. They also will help fund the center’s work; currently, 11 companies have committed a total of $550,000 for the first year. NSF will contribute an additional $450,000 per year.
 
The collective goal is to create a system to make the design evaluation process much easier, says Paul Franzon, a professor of electrical engineering and CAEML site lead at NC State.
 
“I like to say that a silicon chip is the most complex artifact made by man,” Franzon said. “There are billions of components in a chip-- it is mind-boggling. We’re creating models that help deal with these complexities, so that when we design chips, we design them to work the first time.”
 

Visit the CAEML Program Website Here

For more information, contact Dr. Madhavan Swaminathan (madhavan.swaminathan@ece.gatech.edu)

The hosted students, their paired PIs, and research topics may be found below:

Thomas Metke, Vanderbilt – Host PI: Todd Sulchek - Research Topic: High throughput cell separation with microfluidic devices

Cooper Thome, University of Tennessee – Host PI: Elsa Reichmanis - Research Topic: Cellulose Nanocrystal Liquid Crystal Templating of Conductive PEDOT:PSS

Michael Vander Zwaag, University of Michigan – Host PI: Kim Kurtis - Research Topic: Making "Greener" Concrete Using Titanium Dioxide Nanoparticles

John Nance, University of North Carolina – Host PI: Peter Hesketh - Research Topic: Characterization of NiFe Artificial Cilia

Elizabeth Tom, University of Michigan – Host PI: Michael Filler - Research Topic: Plasmonic-Phononic Hybrid Nanowires: New Materials for Extreme Infrared Light Focusing

Yaneira Gonzalez, University of Puerto Rico – Host PI: Todd Sulchek - Research Topic: Effects of Metal Presence on the Structure, Reactivity and Transformation of Magnesium Oxides

After the conclusion of the program, the students will present talks and posters on their research and attend a joint, one day convocation on July 28^th, along with the College of Engineering’s SURE REU program.

Please join us in welcoming the attendees to Georgia Tech as we host them over the 2016 summer session.       

- Christa M. Ernst    

The technique uses a simple circuit pattern with just three electrodes to assign a unique seven-bit digital identification number to each cell passing through the channels on the microfluidic chip. The new technique also captures information about the sizes of the cells, and how fast they are moving. That identification and information could allow automated counting and analysis of the cells being sorted.

The research, reported in the journal Lab on a Chip, could provide the electronic intelligence that might one day allow inexpensive labs on a chip to conduct sophisticated medical testing outside the confines of hospitals and clinics. The technology can track cells with better than 90 percent accuracy in a four-channel chip.

“We are digitizing information about the sorting done on a microfluidic chip,” explained Fatih Sarioglu, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “By combining microfluidics, electronics and telecommunications principles, we believe this will help address a significant challenge on the output side of lab-on-a-chip technology.”

Microfluidic chips use the unique biophysical or biochemical properties of cells and viruses to separate them. For instance, antigens can be used to select bacteria or cancer cells and route them into separate channels. But to obtain information about the results of the sorting, those cells must now be counted using optical methods.

The new technique, dubbed microfluidic CODES, adds a grid of micron-scale electrical circuitry beneath the microfluidic chip. Current flowing through the circuitry creates an electrical field in the microfluidic channels above the grid. When a cell passes through one of the microfluidic channels, it creates an impedance change in the circuitry that signals the cell’s passage and provides information about the cell’s location, size and the speed at which it is moving through the channel.

This impedance change has been used for many years to detect the presence of cells in a fluid, and is the basis for the Coulter Counter which allowed blood counts to be done quickly and reliably. But the microfluidic CODES technique goes beyond counting.

The positive and negative charges from the intermingled electrical circuits create a unique identifying digital signal as each cell passes by, and that sequence of ones and zeroes is attached to information about the impedance change. The unique identifying signals from multiple cells can be separated and read by a computer, allowing scientists to track not only the properties of the cells, but also how many cells have passed through each channel.

“By judiciously aligning the grid pattern, we can generate the codes at the locations we choose when the cells pass by,” Sarioglu explained. “By measuring the current conduction in the whole system, we can identify when a cell passes by each location.”

Because the cells sorted into each channel of a microfluidic chip have certain characteristics in common, the technique would allow the automated detection of cancer cells, bacteria or even viruses in a fluid sample. Sarioglu and his students have demonstrated that they can track more than a thousand ovarian cancer cells with an accuracy rate of better than 90 percent.

The underlying principle for the cell identification is called code division multiple access (CDMA), and it’s essential for helping cellular networks separate the signals from each user. The microfluidic channels are fabricated from a plastic material using soft lithographic techniques. The electrical pattern is fabricated separately on a glass substrate, then aligned with the plastic chip

“We have created an electronic sensor without any active components,” Sarioglu said. “It’s just a layer of metal, cleverly patterned. The cells and the metallic layer work together to generate digital signals in the same way that cellular telephone networks keep track of each caller’s identity. We are creating the equivalent of a cellphone network on a microfluidic chip.”

The next step in the research will be to combine the electronic sensor with a microfluidic chip able to actively sort cells. Beyond cancer cells, bacteria and viruses, such a system could also sort and analyze inorganic particles.

The computing requirements of the system would be minimal, requiring no more than the processor power of smartphones that already handle decoding of CDMA signals. The proof-of-principle device contains just four channels, but Sarioglu believes the design could easily be scaled up to include many more channels.

“This is like putting a USB port on a microfluidic chip,” he explained. “Our technique could turn all of the microfluidic manipulations that are happening on the chip into quantitative data related to diagnostic measurements.

Ultimately, the researchers hope to create inexpensive chips that could be used for sophisticated diagnostic testing in physician offices or remote locations. Chips might be contained on cartridges that would automate the testing process.

“It will be very exciting to scale this up, and I think that will open up the possibility for many different assays to become accessible electronically,” Sarioglu said. “Decentralizing health care is an important trend, and our technology might one day allow many kinds of diagnostic tests to be done beyond hospitals and large medical facilities.”

Other co-authors of the paper included Ruxiu Liu, Ningquan Wang, and Farhan Kamili, all Georgia Tech graduate students.

CITATION: Ruxiu Liu, Ningquan Wang, Farhan Kamili and A. Fatih Sarioglu, “Microfluidic CODES: a scalable multiplexed electronic sensor for orthogonal detection of particles in microfluidic channels,” (Lab on a Chip, 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/c6lc00209a

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0181 USA

Media Relations Contacts: John Toon (jtoon@gatech.edu) (404-894-6986) or Ben Brumfield (ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu) (404-385-1933).

Writer: John Toon

These new methods of communication, which can reach anyone in the world, effectively for free, spurred Dr. Michael Filler to launch the Nanovation podcast.

Although the term nanotechnology refers to the science of the small, matter at the nanometer scale, the research has broad applications across scientific and technological boundaries. Solar cells, batteries, anti-cancer drugs, smart textiles, cosmetics, concrete, and household paints are just a few of the varied products that are currently using, or may soon use, nanotechnology. According to Dr. Filler, “…the technologies that emerge from our capability to manipulate matter at ultra small scales will profoundly change everyday life. Nanotechnology is a more precise way of doing everything — making things, assembling things, measuring things, sorting things, etc. From construction and energy to health and information technology, few industries will be immune to its influence.”

The Nanovation podcast is a forum to address the big questions, challenges, and opportunities of nanotechnology. By bridging the gap between what’s happening in research labs and commercial technology development, the podcast ultimately aims to understand where the nanotechnology road leads and how it will impact society. The podcast is conversational in format and aimed at a general, yet technically-savvy audience.

Visit the Nanovation Podcast website or subscribe via iTunes.

Rodrigues is currently a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and ECE Associate Professor Wenshan Cai was his master’s thesis advisor and now serves as his Ph.D. advisor.

Rodrigues will be recognized for his M.S. thesis entitled “Enhancing Chiroptical Signals from Metamaterials via Nonlinear Excitation.” His groundbreaking research on metamaterials has led to two first-authored papers in Advanced Materials, several co-authored papers in journals like Nature Materials and Nature Communications, and two first-authored essays/reviews in Science and Nature Nanotechnology.

Rodrigues graduated with his M.S. degree in December 2015, and his research interests are focused on metamaterials, plasmonics, nonlinear optics, photonics, and microsystems. Rodrigues was also an NSF Graduate Research Fellow Program awardee and a Goizueta GoSTEM Fellow, and in January, he received an Intel scholarship at the annual FOCUS President’s Dinner, which was part of diversity activities hosted over the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day weekend.

In order to foster interdisciplinary communication among its users, IEN will be hosting its third IEN User Day on Tuesday, May 17, 2016 (8:30 AM to 4:45 PM). This special event will provide an opportunity to learn about the latest research activities from academic and industry organizations that use IEN facilities. This venue will also offer a great opportunity to share a glimpse of your work with the diverse audience in attendance. While registration for the event is required, there is no cost to attend and continental breakfast and a box lunch will be provided.

As a user of our facility, we invite and highly encourage you to submit an abstract to be considered for one of the two poster sessions scheduled for this event. Outstanding posters will be recognized at the end of the day. The topics for contributed work include, but are not limited to: electronics, optics/photonics, material, biomedical devices, fabrication technologies, sensors, and next generation devices. Users interested in presenting their research are requested to submit a 1-page abstract (no more than 500 words and 1-2 figures) describing their research activities using IEN facilities. The abstract must include a title, authors (indicating clearly the presenting author), and their affiliations. Abstracts will be reviewed by a panel of faculty and research staff, and those selected will be notified by email. The deadline for submission of the abstracts is Tuesday, April 19, 2016. Please email your abstract to amy.duke@ien.gatech.edu.

Important Dates:
April 19: Abstract submission deadline (email to amy.duke@ien.gatech.edu)
May 3: Notification of abstract acceptance
May 5: Agenda finalized and registration opens
May 13: Registration deadline

Program Eligibility

Georgia Tech Applicants
This program is open to any current Georgia Tech or GTRI faculty member as project PI. The graduate student performing the research should be in the first 2 years of his/her graduate studies, and preference will be given to students who are new users of the IEN facilities. The student’s research advisor (project PI) does not need to be a current user of the IEN cleanroom/lab facilities.

External (non-Georgia Tech) Applicants
Recent funding from the NSF to create the Southeastern Nanotechnology Infrastructure Corridor (SENIC, http://senic.gatech.edu/) as part of the NNCI has allowed IEN to open this program to external (not affiliated with Georgia Tech) users currently at an academic institution in the southeastern US. The graduate student performing the proposed research cannot be a current user of the IEN facilities. The student’s research advisor (project PI) may have a current project in place for use of the IEN cleanroom/lab facilities, but this is not a requirement. If awarded, a specialized service agreement will need to be arranged with the user’s home institution.

Past awardees of a seed grant may submit additional proposals for different students/projects, but not in consecutive funding cycles. It is the responsibility of the project PI and student to determine their ability to make use of the awarded time during the grant period. Extensions requested once the project has begun will not be granted.

Award Information
Each seed grant award will consist of free cleanroom access to the student identified in the proposal for 2 (consecutive) billing quarters. Based on current access rates and the academic cap on hourly charges (https://cleanroom.ien.gatech.edu/rates/), this comprises a maximum award of $6000 for the 6 month period. This maximum award amount is still in effect even if IEN non-cleanroom (lab) equipment or electron beam lithography (EBL) is required. The designated student user is expected to only utilize the cleanroom/tool access while working with the PI on the proposed project. Members of the IEN Advanced Technology Team (ATT) will be available to consult during the project period. The number of awards for each proposal submission date will depend on the number and quality of the proposals. A short report describing the research activities is required midway and at the completion of the award period.

Submission Schedule
This Seed Grant program is offered in two competitions each year with due dates on April 1 and October 1. While it is expected that research activity will begin on June 1 and December 1, respectively, there is flexibility in scheduling the 2 quarters of research work, as long as they conform to the IEN billing quarters.

Proposal Requirements (2 pages max)
The proposal (submitted as a PDF file of no more than 2 pages) should do the following:
1. Provide a project title.
2. Identify the research problem and specify the proposed methods.
3. Indicate the IEN research tools necessary to conduct the research. If assistance is needed with this component, members of the IEN Advanced Technology Team are available for consultation.
4. Describe the relationship of this research to the PI’s other research activity.
5. Identify the PI and the graduate student involved (including year of graduate work), and if there will be a mentoring relationship with the PI’s other students. Note if there are collaborative relationships with Georgia Tech faculty that bear on this research project.
6. Specify the potential for follow-on funding based on the results of this initial work.
Submit the PDF file by the specified due date to Ms. Amy Duke (amy.duke@ien.gatech.edu).

Review Criteria
Proposals will initially be reviewed by IEN staff for technical feasibility within the 6-month time frame. Rating of proposals will be done by a review committee of Georgia Tech faculty, with final selection of awardees by IEN staff.

For more information, please contact Dr. David Gottfried, dsgottfried@gatech.edu, (404) 894-0479.

Ciciliano is a bioengineering student whose home school is the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. She’s a member of Wilbur Lam’s lab in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, where her research interests are biomechanics, diagnostics, microfluidics, hematology, and oncology.

As winner of the $1,000 top prize, her name will be engraved on the award plaque and she’ll deliver a presentation on her research, entitled, “Developing microfluidic approaches to solve longstanding hematologic questions," at the Suddath Symposium (Feb. 11-12 at the Petit Institute).

Read More

Now, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have developed a new nondestructive technique for investigating these material changes by examining the acoustic response at the nanoscale. Information obtained from this technique – which uses electrically-conductive atomic force microscope (AFM) probes – could guide efforts to design materials with enhanced properties at small size scales.

The approach has been used in ferroelectric materials, but could also have applications in ferroelastics, solid protonic acids and materials known as relaxors. Sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the research was reported December 15 in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

“We have developed a new characterization technique that allows us to study changes in the crystalline structure and changes in materials behavior at substantially smaller length scales with a relatively simple approach,” said Nazanin Bassiri-Gharb, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “Knowing where these phase transitions happen and at which length scales can help us design next-generation materials.”

In ferroelectric materials such as PZT (lead zirconate titanate), phase transitions can occur at the boundaries between one crystal type and another, under external stimuli. Properties such as the piezoelectric and dielectric effects can be amplified at the boundaries, which are caused by the multi-element “confused chemistry” of the materials. Determining when these transitions occur can be done in bulk materials using various techniques, and at the smallest scales using an electron microscope.

The researchers realized they could detect these phase transitions using acoustic techniques in samples at size scales between the bulk and tens of atoms. Using band-excitation piezoresponse force microscopy (BE-PFM) techniques developed at ORNL, they analyzed the resulting changes in resonant frequencies to detect phase changes in sample sizes relevant to the material applications. To do that, they applied an electric field to the samples using an AFM tip that had been coated with platinum to make it conductive, and through generation and detection of a band of frequencies.

“We’ve had very good techniques for characterizing these phase changes at the large scale, and we’ve been able to use electron microscopy to figure out almost atomistically where the phase transition occurs, but until this technique was developed, we had nothing in between,” said Bassiri-Gharb. “To influence the structure of these materials through chemical or other means, we really needed to know where the transition breaks down, and at what length scale that occurs. This technique fills a gap in our knowledge.”

The changes the researchers detect acoustically are due to the elastic properties of the materials, so virtually any material with similar changes in elastic properties could be studied in this way. Bassiri-Gharb is interested in ferroelectrics such as PZT, but materials used in fuel cells, batteries, transducers and energy-harvesting devices could also be examined this way.

“This new method will allow for much greater insight into energy-harvesting and energy transduction materials at the relevant length sales,” noted Rama Vasudeven, the first author of the paper and a materials scientist at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, a U.S. Department of Energy user facility at ORNL.

The researchers also modeled the relaxor-ferroelectric materials using thermodynamic methods, which supported the existence of a phase transition and the evolution of a complex domain pattern, in agreement with the experimental results.

Use of the AFM-based technique offers a number of attractive features. Laboratories already using AFM equipment can easily modify it to analyze these materials by adding electronic components and a conductive probe tip, Bassiri-Gharb noted. The AFM equipment can be operated under a range of temperature, electric field and other environmental conditions that are not easily implemented for electron microscope analysis, allowing scientists to study these materials under realistic operating conditions.

“This technique can probe a range of different materials at small scales and under difficult environmental conditions that would be inaccessible otherwise,” said Bassiri-Gharb. “Materials used in energy applications experience these kinds of conditions, and our technique can provide the information we need to engineer materials with enhanced responses.”

Though widely used, relaxor-ferroelectrics and PZT are still not well understood. In relaxor-ferroelectrics, for example, it’s believed that there are pockets of material in phases that differ from the bulk, a distortion that may help confer the material’s attractive properties. Using their technique, the researchers confirmed that the phase transitions can be extremely localized.

They also learned that high responses of the materials occurred at those same locations.
Next steps would include varying the chemical composition of the material to see if those transitions – and enhanced properties – can be controlled. The researchers also plan to examine other materials.

“It turns out that many energy-related materials have electrical transitions, so we think this is going to be very important for studying functional materials in general,” Bassiri-Gharb added. “The potential for gaining new understanding of these materials and their applications are huge.”

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through grant DMR-1255379. A portion of this research was conducted at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility at ORNL. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NSF or DOE.

CITATION: Rama K. Vasudevan, et al., “Acoustic Detection of Phase Transitions at the Nanoscale,” (Advanced Functional Materials, 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/adfm.201504407

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
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Three full to capacity short courses have been held on microfabrication and soft lithography for microfluidics in the spring and fall of 2015. The IEN’s Dr. Hang Chen coordinated 2 sessions on Microfabrication, which were geared at introducing basic microfabrication techniques to students and professional attendees. The 3.5 day courses, which were held on June 1-4 and October 19-22, combined lecture and hands-on sessions in the Marcus Nanotechnology cleanrooms. The course began with basic cleanroom orientation and safety training, then proceeded on to more focused lecture topics such as photolithography, thin film deposition, wet and dry etching, packaging, and characterization. The afternoon hands-on sessions enabled attendees to use the techniques they learned during the lectures sessions to fabricate simple micro-electronic devices.

A post-course survey of the attendees elicited positive response and the drive to develop future courses. Comments from external attendees include, “Great course, great price, great organization on part of staff…” “Facilities and staff are a pleasure to work with…” “The course was very well executed, the instructors and staff were very knowledgeable and friendly…” and, “Excellent cleanroom experience, looking for near future collaborative project.” Attendees also expressed a desire to be informed of upcoming courses and for greater access by offering online courses for overseas and external user registrants.

Dr. Paul Joseph, IEN’s Principal Research Scientist & Coordinator for External User (Academia, Industry & Government) Programs, conducted a workshop on Soft Lithography for microfluidic applications, on October 8^th and 9^th. The workshop was evenly divided into laboratory hands-on training sessions including SU-8 master mold creation using photolithography and PDMS device fabrication in the IEN cleanroom, supporting lectures, and project consultations. Dr. Joseph’s workshop also comprised lecture topics such as, bio-applications in microfluidics, soft lithography methods of fabrication, and microfluidic device flow demonstrations. This bio-related workshop is offered to connect and support non-traditional users from life sciences communities.

The response from Dr. Joseph’s course was also positive, including these comments from non-GT attendees, “…I had brought up my interest in soft lithography at the microfabrication course and was very pleased that it is now offered. Thanks!”  and, “…organization and presentation is outstanding!” Other comments offered helpful suggestions such as increasing the length of the course to allow for more hands-on sessions and pre-preparing samples to speed up the lab sessions and alleviate sample prep wait times.

Due to the positive response from course attendees, and with the knowledge that fostering an attitude of appreciation for lifelong learning is the key to workplace success, the IEN technical staff have planned upcoming short course sessions for the 2016 calendar year. Dr. Chen plans to offer 2 sets of the microfabrication short course, one for the dates of March 21 – 24, during the 2016 Spring Class Break, and a second series tentatively on August 22-25, over the 2016 Summer Break. Dr. Joseph has also planned 2 sessions for the Soft Lithography for Microfluidics for April 21st & 22nd and July 21st & 22nd, 2016.*

For students and professionals alike, taking the time to participate in courses such as these show the student’s PI or academic/industry attendee’s employer that the participants have a drive and commitment to develop their skill-set as well as allowing participants the opportunity to learn from experts in the field, interact with other class members, and grow their professional network.

- Christa M. Ernst

To stay up to date on all of the IEN’s lectures, events and short courses, visit: ien.gatech.edu or subscribe to the IEN digital newsletter.

*All dates are tentative, please subscribe to the IEN newsletter to receive updates on these, and other IEN events, lectures and news.

Combined with connection technology that operates through structures in the cooling passages, the new technologies could allow development of denser and more powerful integrated electronic systems that would no longer require heat sinks or cooling fans on top of the integrated circuits. Working with popular 28-nanometer FPGA devices made by Altera Corp., the researchers have demonstrated a monolithically-cooled chip that can operate at temperatures more than 60 percent below those of similar air-cooled chips.

In addition to more processing power, the lower temperatures can mean longer device life and less current leakage. The cooling comes from simple de-ionized water flowing through microfluidic passages that replace the massive air-cooled heat sinks normally placed on the backs of chips.

“We believe we have eliminated one of the major barriers to building high-performance systems that are more compact and energy efficient,” said Muhannad Bakir, an associate professor and ON Semiconductor Junior Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “We have eliminated the heat sink atop the silicon die by moving liquid cooling just a few hundred microns away from the transistors. We believe that reliably integrating microfluidic cooling directly on the silicon will be a disruptive technology for a new generation of electronics.”

Supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the research is believed to be the first example of liquid cooling directly on an operating high-performance CMOS chip. Details of the research were presented on September 28 at the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference in San Jose, Calif.

Liquid cooling has been used to address the heat challenges facing computing systems whose power needs have been increasing. However, existing liquid cooling technology removes heat using cold plates externally attached to fully packaged silicon chips – adding thermal resistance and reducing the heat-rejection efficiency.

To make their liquid cooling system, Bakir and graduate student Thomas Sarvey removed the heat sink and heat-spreading materials from the backs of stock Altera FPGA chips. They then etched cooling passages into the silicon, incorporating silicon cylinders approximately 100 microns in diameter to improve heat transmission into the liquid. A silicon layer was then placed over the flow passages, and ports were attached for the connection of water tubes.

In multiple tests – including a demonstration for DARPA officials in Arlington, Virginia – a liquid-cooled FPGA was operated using a custom processor architecture provided by Altera. With a water inlet temperature of approximately 20 degrees Celsius and an inlet flow rate of 147 milliliters per minute, the liquid-cooled FPGA operated at a temperature of less than 24 degrees Celsius, compared to an air-cooled device that operated at 60 degrees Celsius.

Sudhakar Yalamanchili, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and one of the research group’s collaborators, joined the team for the DARPA demonstration to discuss electrical-thermal co-design.

“We have created a real electronic platform to evaluate the benefits of liquid cooling versus air cooling,” said Bakir. “This may open the door to stacking multiple chips, potentially multiple FPGA chips or FPGA chips with other chips that are high in power consumption. We are seeing a significant reduction in the temperature of these liquid-cooled chips.”

The research team chose FPGAs for their test because they provide a platform to test different circuit designs, and because FPGAs are common in many market segments, including defense. However, the same technology could also be used to cool CPUs, GPUs and other devices such as power amplifiers, Bakir said.

In addition to improving overall cooling, the system could reduce hotspots in circuits by applying cooling much closer to the power source. Eliminating the heat sink could allow more compact packaging of electronic devices – but only if electrical connection issues are also addressed.

In a separate research project, Bakir’s group has demonstrated the fabrication of copper vias that would run through the silicon columns that are part of the cooling structure fabricated on the FPGAs. Graduate student Hanju Oh, co-advised with College of Engineering Dean Gary May, fabricated high aspect ratio copper vias through the silicon columns, reducing the capacitance of the connections that would carry signals between chips in an array.

“The moment you start thinking about stacking the chips, you need to have copper vias to connect them,” Bakir said. “By bringing system components closer together, we can reduce interconnect length and that will lead to improvements in bandwidth density and reductions in energy use.”

The cooling research was funded by DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office, through the ICECOOL program. At Georgia Tech, DARPA funds two major cooling and system integration projects, one called STAECool directed by George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering Professor Yogendra Joshi, and the other, called SuperCool, that is directed by Bakir. In collaboration with the STAECool effort, Bakir and Joshi, along with Professors Andrei Fedorov and Suresh Sitaraman from the School of Mechanical Engineering, developed a thermal design vehicle to emulate challenging power maps to test the benefits of microfluidic cooling.

“We have reached an important milestone that we hope to use as a stepping stone to reach other objectives,” said Bakir. “There is still a big challenge ahead, but we expect this to allow much denser, higher-performance computing systems that will dissipate less power. We can think of many interesting applications for these cooling technologies.”

Altera’s principal investigator for the project, Arifur Rahman, said: “Future high-performance semiconductor electronics will be increasingly dominated by thermal budget and ability to remove heat. The embedded microfluidic channels provide an intriguing option to remove heat from future microelectronics systems.”

This research was supported by DARPA-MTO; the contents of the news release are the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of DARPA.

CITATION: Thomas E. Sarvey, et al., “Embedded Cooling Technologies for Densely Integrated Electronic Systems,” (IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference, 2015).

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Georgia Institute of Technology
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Capillary action draws water and other liquids into confined spaces such as tubes, straws, wicks and paper towels, and the flow rate can be predicted using a simple hydrodynamic analysis. But a chance observation by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology will cause a recalculation of those predictions for conditions in which hydrogel films line the tubes carrying water-based liquids.

“Rather than moving according to conventional expectations, water-based liquids slip to a new location in the tube, get stuck, then slip again – and the process repeats over and over again,” explained Andrei Fedorov, a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. “Instead of filling the tube with a rate of liquid penetration that slows with time, the water propagates at a nearly constant speed into the hydrogel-coated capillary. This was very different from what we had expected.”

The findings resulted from research sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) through the BIONIC center at Georgia Tech, and were reported earlier this month in the journal Soft Matter.

When the opening of a thin glass tube is exposed to a droplet of water, the liquid begins to flow into the tube, pulled by a combination of surface tension in the liquid and adhesion between the liquid and the walls of the tube. Leading the way is a meniscus, a curved surface of the water at the leading edge of the water column. An ordinary borosilicate glass tube fills by capillary action at a gradually decreasing rate with the speed of meniscus propagation slowing as a square root of time.

But when the inside of a tube is coated with a very thin layer of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide), a so-called “smart” polymer (PNIPAM), everything changes. Water entering a tube coated on the inside with a dry hydrogel film must first wet the film and allow it to swell before it can proceed farther into the tube. The wetting and swelling take place not continuously, but with discrete steps in which the water meniscus first sticks and its motion remains arrested while the polymer layer locally deforms. The meniscus then rapidly slides for a short distance before the process repeats. This “stick-slip” process forces the water to move into the tube in a step-by-step motion.

The flow rate measured by the researchers in the coated tube is three orders of magnitude less than the flow rate in an uncoated tube. A linear equation describes the time dependence of the filling process instead of a classical quadratic equation which describes filling of an uncoated tube.

“Instead of filling the capillary in a hundredth of a second, it might take tens of seconds to fill the same capillary,” said Fedorov. “Though there is some swelling of the hydrogel upon contact with water, the change in the tube diameter is negligible due to the small thickness of the hydrogel layer. This is why we were so surprised when we first observed such a dramatic slow-down of the filing process in our experiments.”

The researchers – who included graduate students James Silva, Drew Loney and Ren Geryak and senior research engineer Peter Kottke – tried the experiment again using glycerol, a liquid that is not absorbed by the hydrogel. With glycerol, the capillary action proceeded through the hydrogel-coated microtube as with an uncoated tube in agreement with conventional theory. After using high-resolution optical visualization to study the meniscus propagation while the polymer swelled, the researchers realized they could put this previously-unknown behavior to good use.

Water absorption by the hydrogels occurs only when the materials remain below a specific transition temperature. When heated above that temperature, the materials no longer absorb water, eliminating the “stick-slip” phenomenon in the microtubes and allowing them to behave like ordinary tubes.

This ability to turn the stick-slip behavior on and off with temperature could provide a new way to control the flow of water-based liquid in microfluidic devices, including labs-on-a-chip. The transition temperature can be controlled by varying the chemical composition of the hydrogel.

“By locally heating or cooling the polymer inside a microfluidic chamber, you can either speed up the filling process or slow it down,” Fedorov said. “The time it takes for the liquid to travel the same distance can be varied up to three orders of magnitude. That would allow precise control of fluid flow on demand using external stimuli to change polymer film behavior.”

The heating or cooling could be done locally with lasers, tiny heaters, or thermoelectric devices placed at specific locations in the microfluidic devices.

That could allow precise timing of reactions in microfluidic devices by controlling the rate of reactant delivery and product removal, or allow a sequence of fast and slow reactions to occur. Another important application could be controlled drug release in which the desired rate of molecule delivery could be dynamically tuned over time to achieve the optimal therapeutic outcome.

In future work, Fedorov and his team hope to learn more about the physics of the hydrogel-modified capillaries and study capillary flow using partially-transparent microtubes. They also want to explore other “smart” polymers which change the flow rate in response to different stimuli, including the changing pH of the liquid, exposure to electromagnetic radiation, or the induction of mechanical stress – all of which can change the properties of a particular hydrogel designed to be responsive to those triggers.

“These experimental and theoretical results provide a new conceptual framework for liquid motion confined by soft, dynamically evolving polymer interfaces in which the system creates an energy barrier to further motion through elasto-capillary deformation, and then lowers the barrier through diffusive softening,” the paper’s authors wrote. “This insight has implications for optimal design of microfluidic and lab-on-a-chip devices based on stimuli-responsive smart polymers.”

In addition to those already mentioned, the research team included Professor Vladimir Tsukruk from the Georgia Tech School of Materials Science and Engineering and Rajesh Naik, Biotechnology Lead and Tech Advisor of the Nanostructured and Biological Materials Branch of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).

This research was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research BIONIC Center through awards FA9550-09-1-0162 and FA9550-14-1-0269, AFOSR award FA-9550-14-1-0015, and by Georgia Tech’s Renewable Bioproducts Institute Fellowship. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsors.

CITATION: J.E. Silva, et al., “Stick-Slip Water Penetration into Capillaries Coated with Swelling Hydrogel,” (Soft Matter, 11, pp. 5933-5939, 2015).

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Professor Wang has made original and innovative contributions to the synthesis, discovery, characterization, and understanding of fundamental physical properties of oxide nanobelts and nanowires, as well as applications of nanowires in energy sciences, electronics, optoelectronics, and biological science. He is a leading figure in ZnO nanostructure research. His discovery and breakthroughs in developing nanogenerators established the principle and technological road map for harvesting mechanical energy from environmental and biological systems for powering personal electronics. His research on self-powered nanosystems has inspired the worldwide effort in academia and industry for studying energy for micro-nano-systems, which is now a distinct discipline in energy research and future sensor networks. He coined and pioneered the field of piezotronics and piezo-phototronics by introducing piezoelectric potential gated charge transport process in fabricating new electronic and optoelectronic devices. This historical breakthrough by redesigning the CMOS transistor has important applications in smart MEMS/NEMS, nanorobotics, human-electronics interface, and sensors. 

He has authored and co-authored 6 scientific reference and textbooks and over 950 peer-reviewed journal articles (16 in Nature and Science, 8 in Nature sister journals), 45 review papers and book chapters, edited and co-edited 14 volumes of books on nanotechnology, and holds over 100 US and foreign patents. Professor Wang is among the world’s top 5 most cites authors in nanotechnology.

The WTN is a curated membership community comprised of the world’s most innovative individuals and organizations in science, technology, and related fields. The WTN and its members – those creating the 21st century – are focused on exploring what is imminent, possible, and important around emerging technologies. 

The World Technology Awards are presented in 20 categories for “innovative work of the greatest likely long-term significance” to humanity. Award winners are nominated and selected by a peer-reviewed process.

To learn more about Professor Wang’s research visit http://www.nanoscience.gatech.edu

But the liquid jets sometimes form a helical wave. And that was intriguing to Alberto Fernandez-Nieves, an associate professor in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

By controlling the viscosity and speed of the secondary liquid surrounding the jets, a research team led by Fernandez-Nieves has now figured out how to convert the standard chaotic waveform to the stable helical form. Based on theoretical modeling and experiments using a microfluidic device, the findings could help improve industrial processes that are used for fiber formation and electrospray.

The research, conducted in collaboration with the University of Seville in Spain, was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF). It was reported Sept. 8, 2014, in the early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“We are developing an understanding of the basic coupling between hydrodynamic and electric fields in these systems,” said Fernandez-Nieves. “The issue we examined is fundamental physics, but it could potentially lead to something more interesting in fiber generation through electro-spinning.”

In conventional industrial processes, tiny metal needles apply an electric field as they eject the polymer-containing solution. In the laboratory, the researchers used a glass-based microfluidic device to create the jets so they could more closely examine what was happening. Using a conductive liquid, ethylene glycol, allowed them to apply an electrical field to produce electrified jets.

“When you charge these polymer solutions, the jets themselves move out of axis, which creates a chaotic phenomenon known as whipping,” Fernandez-Nieves explained. “This off-axis movement causes the jet to abruptly move in all directions, and in the industrial world, all that motion seems to be beneficial from the standpoint of making thinner fibers.”

The researchers experimented with many variables as their liquid jets emerged into a co-flowing secondary liquid inside the microfluidic device. Those variables included the applied electrical field, the flow rate of the ejected liquid and the secondary liquid, the viscosities of the liquids, the needle diameters and the physical geometry of microfluidic device.

While producing a whipped jet in a viscous dielectric material – polydimethylsiloxane oil – the researchers were surprised to see the chaotic motion switch over to a steady-state helical structure.

“We were able to stabilize the structure associated with the whipping behavior and found that the stable structure is a helix with a conical shape,” said Fernandez-Nieves. “You can picture it as a conical envelope, and inside the envelope you have a helix. Once the viscosity of the outer liquid is sufficient, you stabilize the structure and get this beautiful helix.”

Georgia Tech postdoctoral fellow Josefa Guerrero used a high-speed, microscope-based video camera operating at 50,000 frames per second to study the waveforms emerging from the experimental jets, which were less than five microns in diameter. The video allowed precise examination of the waveforms produced when the liquid flowed out of the glass needle and into the second liquid flowing around it.

Working with collaborators Javier Rivero-Rodriguez and Miguel Perez-Saborid at the University of Seville, the Georgia Tech team – Fernandez-Nieves, Guerrero and former postdoctoral fellow Venkata R. Gundabala – used hydrodynamics theory to help understand what they were seeing experimentally.

“By developing the model, we were able to balance the importance of the different forces in the experiment,” explained Fernandez-Nieves. “The helix was part of the solutions in the model and it reproduced some aspects of the experimentally observed helices.”

Once the jets were stabilized by the viscous secondary liquid, the properties of the helix were controlled by the electrical charge. In the experiment, the researchers applied approximately 1,000 volts to generate the jets.

“We learned that the outer fluid plays a major role in stabilizing the structure of the jets,” Fernandez-Nieves added. “Once the structure is stable, the details of the properties of the helical structure depend on the charge.”

Ultimately, the stable jets break up into spherical droplets. The researchers have not yet formed fibers with their experimental setup.

In future work, Fernandez-Nieves hopes to study other waveforms that may be produced by the system, and evaluate how controlling the liquid jets could improve industrial techniques used in fiber production and electrospray processes that generate clouds of droplets.

“We are interested in trying to map out those different behaviors,” he said. “For us as physicists, this is interesting because it allows us to explore, address and measure things that nobody could look at before in the way we can today. We are anxious to understand the applied impact.”

CITATION: Josefa Guerrero, et al., “Whipping of electrified jets,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2014.

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under award CBET-0967293. Any opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the officials views of the National Science Foundation.

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Media Relations Assistance: John Toon (jtoon@gatech.edu) (404-894-6986) or Brett Israel (brett.israel@comm.gatech.edu) (404-385-1933).

Writer: John Toon

With this teacher centric goal in mind, the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN) site at Georgia Institute of Technology sought funding from the National Science Foundation to establish the Research Experience for Teachers (RET) Program to connect the education of K-12 graders and university level research into the fields of nano-science and engineering. The eight week program pairs teachers with faculty, post-docs, and graduate students, involving them in hands-on equipment usage, experimental processes, and assisting them in developing a lesson plan they implement in their classrooms upon return to their home institution........

Follow this link to meet the NNIN-IEN guest researchers and their faculty partners.

---Christa M. Ernst, IEN Communications

Institute Lafayette at the Georgia Tech campus in Lorraine, France, began as a teaching and research center but, under the guidance of its newly appointed President Bernard Kippelen, is about to become a central point for optoelectronics technology transfer and commercialization. Institute Lafayette houses offices, laboratories, and a 5,000-square-foot clean room, equipped with state-of-the art nano fabrication tools to support the innovations it is discovering in optoelectronics and advanced semiconductor materials research.

Also in attendance among the 350 guests were the U.S. consul general from Strasbourg, France, along with French officials from the Lorraine region and research and corporate partners.

To read more about Georgia Tech's Lafayette Institute, follow this link.

Andrés García, Regents’ Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, spearheaded research that has the potential of improving the lives of millions of people, particularly people with diabetes.

Much of the García lab’s research is focused on engineering hydrogels for the delivery of protein and cell therapies. In April, García and a team of researchers in his lab published a research paper with the bulky title, “Microfluidic-Based Generation of Size-Controlled, Biofunctionalized Synthetic Polymer Microgels for Cell Encapsulation,” in the journal Advanced Materials.

“We’ve made a material that is really a hybrid, elements that are pure synthetic chemistry components, and other elements that are biological,” says García, who co-authored the paper with graduate research assistant Deavon Headen from the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Guillaume Aubry, a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CHBE), and Hang Lu, CHBE professor and James R. Fair Faculty Fellow.

The paper is getting a lot of attention among researchers, according to García, “and not just people who work in the cell encapsulation area, although some people in this area are very excited about it, and it’s because this strategy shows the potential to have tremendous control in designing the properties of this encapsulation material, and it overcomes a lot of the limitations of the current materials people use. The precise control of this material is what people are excited about.”

In essence, they’ve designed a better way to deliver and protect therapeutic, life-saving cells to people with diabetes.

Every day millions of Americans wake up with the sobering knowledge that they have type 1 diabetes (more than 200,000 of them under age 20), which means that their body’s immune system has mistakenly declared open war on the pancreatic beta cells that make insulin, a hormone that is required in converting food to energy.

Without insulin, glucose builds up to deadly levels in the bloodstream. So, millions of people (mostly people with type 1 diabetes, but some with type 2) give themselves daily insulin injections, or hook themselves up to an insulin pump, in order to stay alive.

There are alternatives – potentially more effective and less grueling treatments – emerging. One of the more exciting, designed to restore natural insulin production, is pancreatic islet transplantation – taking healthy islets (which are actually clusters of about 3,000 cells, including beta cells) from a donor pancreas and transplanting them into diabetes patients.

This replacement therapeutic process has shown terrific promise with some research demonstrating that transplanted islets can function for more than 12 years. But if the body’s immune system detects foreign invaders, it responds aggressively, and may react harshly to these transplanted cells, forcing the need for immune suppression drugs.

Cell encapsulation technologies are being developed to overcome this problem, called graft rejection (and to block the ongoing autoimmune attack of type 1 diabetes) in regenerative medicine. Basically, cells are encapsulated within a membrane that permits two-way diffusion, such as incoming molecules essential for cell metabolism, and outgoing waste products and therapeutic proteins, while the semi-permeability of the membrane keeps the body’s immune system from destroying these benevolent foreign invaders (the encapsulated cells).

“Encapsulated cell therapies are a key research priority for JDRF because they hold broad promise of creating insulin independence for people with type 1 diabetes by physiologically regulating blood sugar levels with replacement cells,” says Albert Hwa, senior program scientist for JDRF. “These therapies could move us beyond the limitations of islet transplantation by utilizing multiple cell sources and avoiding the risks and side effects of strong immune suppression therapies.

“Dr. Garcia’s research improves the way hydrogel microcapsules are made and could be the foundation for next-generation cell replacement therapies. JDRF looks forward to additional testing with these novel capsules.”

-Jerry Grillo

The 5 winning projects, from a diverse group of engineering disciplines, were awarded a six month block of IEN cleanroom and lab access time. In keeping with the interdisciplinary mission of IEN, the projects that will be enabled by the grants include research in materials, biomedicine, optoelectronics, and packaging applications.

The Spring 2014 IEN Seed Grant Award winners are:

• Jordan Ciciliano (PI Wilbur Lam, Biomedical Engineering), Point-of-Care Microfluidic Neutrophil Count Diagnostic for Cancer Patients
• Jong Seok Park (PI Hua Wang, Electrical and Computer Engineering), Developing Post-Processing Techniques to Build High-Quality Optical Filters on Standard CMOS Sensor Chips
• Misha Rodin and Sampath Kommandur (PI Shannon Yee, Mechanical Engineering), Measuring Thermal Conductivity of Amorphous Thin-Films
• Ben Rainwater (PI Meilin Liu, Materials Science and Engineering), Fabrication of Thin-film Li-ion Electrolyte Membranes with Vertically Aligned Interfaces Tailored for Dramatic Enhancement of Ionic Conductivity
• Bopeng Zhang (PI Yongsheng Chen, Civil and Environmental Engineering),  Synthesis of Novel Nano-composite Reverse Electrodialysis (RED) Ion-exchange Membranes for Sustainable Energy Production using Salinity Gradient

 Awardees will present the results of their research efforts at the annual IEN User Day in 2015.

For more information about IEN cleanroom facilities, research capabilities, and collaboration opportunities please visit www.ien.gatech.edu.

The study is the first to examine how aspirin and another heart attack prevention drug respond to a variety of mechanical blood flow forces in healthy and diseased arteries. Patients’ blood was tested in a patent-pending microfluidic device with narrow passageways to simulate the coronary arteries. The data are consistent with clinical findings showing that physiology has a major influence on the effectiveness of drugs used for heart attack prevention.

The researchers believe that a benchtop diagnostic device like the one used in this study could save lives by preventing heart attacks and help lower healthcare costs by giving physicians better guidance on how drugs may affect individual patients.

“Doctors have many drug options and it is difficult for them to determine how well each of those options is going to work for a patient,” said Melissa Li, who was a graduate student at the Georgia Institute of Technology at the time of the study. “This study is the first time that a prototype benchtop diagnostic device has tried to address this problem using varying shear rates and patient dosing and tried to make it more personalized.”

The study was sponsored by the American Heart Association, a Wallace H. Coulter Foundation Translational Grant and by a fellowship from the Technological Innovation: Generating Economic Results (TI:GER) program at Georgia Tech. The study was published in a recent edition of the journal PLOS ONE.

About 10 percent of the U.S. population takes drugs every day because they are at risk of a heart attack. When a patient comes to a hospital with heart disease, doctors have multiple treatment options, all with different routes of action, time scales and prices.

“For a patient being prescribed anti-thrombotic drugs who is at risk for a heart attack, we can draw a small amount of their blood and quickly push a little bit through this device, and based on that information, tell them to take a certain amount of a certain drug. That’s where we’re going with this project,” said Craig Forest, an assistant professor of bioengineering in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. Forest’s lab led the study in collaboration with David Ku, a medical doctor and mechanical engineering professor at Georgia Tech. Ku is the Lawrence P. Huang Chair Professor of Engineering Entrepreneurship and a Regents' Professor of Mechanical Engineering.

For the current study, researchers used the diagnostic device to examine two treatments for potential heart attacks: aspirin and a class of drugs called GPIIb/IIIa-inhibitors. GPIIb/IIIa-inhibitors are generally given to patients with a high risk for a heart attack, and these drugs can be expensive. The study found that the two drugs have very different effects on blood clotting.

When arteries are constricted, such as in patients with atherosclerosis, blood must squeeze through narrow passages. That pressurized flow induces a mechanical force called shear. Under high shear rates in arteries— blood flowing through a narrow opening — blood is more likely to clot. When blood is forced to squeeze through a small opening, platelets hook together, forming a clot.

To show how these drugs affect clotting at high and normal shear rates, blood samples were drawn from patients over several days. The scientists added the two drugs at different doses to those blood samples and ran them through a microfluidic device. The microfluidic device has four channels that mimic the coronary arteries, allowing researchers to study clotting under a variety of conditions.

“What we found is that with lower shear rates, such as found in normal arteries, aspirin was fairly effective at stopping platelets from clumping up with each other,” said Li, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington. “At higher shear rates, aspirin was not as effective at preventing these clots.”

The researchers found that under high shear rates, clots still formed in the presence of aspirin, but that the clots became unstable and broke off the simulated artery walls.

Li said that their evidence suggests that aspirin should be fairly effective for most people at preventing heart attacks, but not as effective at preventing heart attacks in patients with atherosclerosis. This study can help identify which individuals can be helped, and which cannot.

The current study would need to be replicated in a large, controlled study before this device can be moved to the clinic or hospital.

“This finding is something that’s been echoed in the literature by physicians who would find that a number of patients who would take aspirin were not receiving any clinical benefit,” Li said. “This is an explanation mechanically of why that might occur.”

That phenomenon has been called aspirin resistance, which is a catchall term for when patients don’t respond to aspirin for unknown reasons.

“What we showed is a good explanation for the conditions under which aspirin resistance occurs and one that matches up with what other people have found,” Li said.

GPIIb/IIIa-inhibitors were effective at preventing blood clots across all shear rates tested, the study found, suggesting that these drugs would be effective for people whether they had atherosclerosis. Clinical evidence also supports this finding, Li said.

The researchers used a statistical method known as the Cox-Hazard analysis, performed by bioengineering graduate student Nathan Hotaling. The analysis is commonly used by doctors to determine if drugs are safe for a patient. Using this analysis in a prototype benchtop diagnostic device is a unique approach and showed that, statistically, the research findings were significant.

“These microfluidic devices are so cheap and require so little blood that it could become possible for someone to use this in a disposable, rapid way,” said Forest.

This research is supported by the American Heart Association (10GRNT4430029), a Wallace H. Coulter Foundation Translational Grant and by a fellowship from the Technological Innovation Generating Economic Results (TI:GER) program at Georgia Tech. Any conclusions or opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring agencies.

CITATION: Melissa Li, et al., “Microfluidic Thrombosis under Multiple Shear Rates and Antiplatelet Therapy Doses,” (PLOS ONE, January 2014). (http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0082493).

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Writer: Brett Israel

This year's Grand Prize is awarded to Keith Knauer and Ehsan Najafabadi for their video entitled, "Organic Light-Emitting Diodes (OLEDs)". The team is awarded the grand prize for receiving the highest overall score. Congratulations Keith and Ehsan!

Scores in the categories of research content and presentation were so close that all teams in this year's contest will share equally in the remaining prizes. The other teams receiving prizes are: 

• "Ordering of Semiconducting Polymers for Organic Electronics" Choi Dalsu, JiHwan Kang, Nabil Kleinhenz, Ashwin Ravisankar, Saujan Sivaram

• "Thermal Transport in Conjugated Polymer Nanotubes for Electronics Cooling" Thomas Bougher and Matthew Smith 

About the Georgia Tech–COPE Research Video Contest
The Georgia Tech–COPE Research Video Contest gives students involved in the field of organic photonics and electronics at Georgia Tech an opportunity to present their research and compete with other students.

Research into the stiffness of diseased cells is lacking, in part due to limits in technology. Researchers have developed a new technology to sort human cells according to their stiffness, which might one day help doctors identify certain diseases in patients, according to a new study.

The research team, from the Georgia Institute of Technology, hopes that their technology might one day aid doctors in the field to rapidly and more accurately diagnose disease.

The new technology is being tested in a small device, about 1 inch wide by 1.5 inches long. Cells are injected into a microfluidic channel on one side of the device. As the cells move through the channel, they are forced to squeeze over a series of ridges that are fabricated at an angle to the channel. If the cells are very flexible, they will easily squeeze over the ridges and follow the fluid stream. But if the cells are stiffer, when they hit a ridge, they will slide along the angled ridge before squeezing over, causing the cells to move to one side, separating them from the softer cells. These ridges eventually separate a single stream of cells into two streams depending on the cells’ stiffness, which in some cases can be an indicator of a disease.

“If you imagine a microfluidic channel that is focusing a stream of cells, you’ll push the cells in different directions based on their mechanical properties,” said study co-author Todd Sulchek, an assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. Sulchek specializes in studying the mechanical properties of cells.

The new research was published Oct. 16 in the journal PLOS ONE. The research was sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The researchers also have a patent on this technology.

“There are no real techniques to sort cells by stiffness right now in large numbers,” said Alexander Alexeev, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. Alexeev is an expert in fluid mechanics and a co-author on the study

A few other research groups are working on microfluidic approaches to sorting cells by stiffness, but Sulchek and Alexeev believe their technology will be quite sensitive.

“There are several microfluidic approaches, but there’s not a real device yet,” Alexeev said. “The main problem is how to sort cells very rapidly because if we are looking at cancer cells, there are very, very few of them. So we need to look at thousands of millions of cells to capture maybe a hundred cancer cells.”

Their technology can sort cells at speeds similar to other cell sorting devices, such as a fluorescently activated cell sorter machine, which is a commonly device used in research labs.
To show that their device can successfully sort cells based on stiffness, the researchers made some cells artificially soft, then labeled them with a different color so they could find them later. After running the cells through their device and analyzing the separated cells by color, they found that the artificially soft cells were separated from the other cells. Then the researchers used atomic force microscopy to probe the cells’ mechanical properties to make sure they were actually different.

“We show that we separate by stiffness, not by other factors,” Sulchek said.

The researchers tested four different commercially available cell lines. White blood cells sort by stiffness particularly well, the researchers reported.

The research team will now work on using their device to separate cancer cells, malaria-infected cells, and sickle cells, and to sort stem cells.

“We’re assured the device is very sensitive to say that the soft cells are all soft, but what we don’t know is whether all the disease cells are soft,” Sulchek said.

Aside from testing for disease, the cell stiffness sorter could also be used in as a method for purifying and enriching an undifferentiated stem cell population from the differentiated cells, which would be useful for laboratory scientists.

“This is also a useful tool for just basic research and understanding what the effect of specific disease is on cell mechanics,” Alexeev said.

Gonghao Wang, a PhD student in Sulchek’s lab, is the first author of the study.

This research is supported by the National Science Foundation under award CBET-0932510. Any conclusions or opinions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring agencies.

CITATION: G Wang, et al., “Stiffness Dependent Separation of Cells in a Microfluidic Device,” (PLOS ONE, 2013). http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0075901

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Media Relations Contacts: Brett Israel (404-385-1933) (brett.israel@comm.gatech.edu) or John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu)

Writer: Brett Israel

Grand Challenges Explorations (GCE) funds individuals worldwide to explore ideas that can break the mold in how we solve persistent global health and development challenges. Dixon’s project is one of the Grand Challenges Explorations Round 10 grants announced May 21 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. 

To receive funding, Dixon and other Grand Challenges Explorations Round 10 winners demonstrated in a two-page online application a bold idea in one of four critical global heath and development topic areas that included agriculture development, neglected tropical diseases and communications.

The grant will fund development of a tissue-engineered model of the human lymphatic system that will support laboratory research into lymphatic filariasis, a parasitic disease known to cause elephantiasis. According to the World Health Organization, the mosquito-borne disease affects more than 120 million persons in tropical areas of the world, and can cause severe disfigurement. The parasitic worms that cause lymphatic filariasis are difficult to study because the most common species of the parasite can survive only in humans. While less common species can be maintained in felines or gerbils, they are challenging to culture long-term outside the host. The model that Dixon plans to develop would use human cells housed within fabricated microfluidic devices to closely simulate the environment where the adult worms live within their hosts, allowing the parasites to be studied longer term in vitro.

“We would use this human lymphatic environment on a microfluidic chip to study the progression of the disease and the communication between the host and the parasite,” explained Dixon, who is also a member of Georgia Tech’s Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. “We could also scale this up to evaluate new pharmaceutical compounds that could potentially target the worm.”

The microfluidic system will include human lymphatic endothelial cells, which are the primary cell type in contact with the worms in the body. Researchers will also include human dermal fibroblasts – an important cell type in the skin where the mosquito first delivers the parasitic infection – and the immune cells that fight infection long-term. Beyond creating the cellular environment needed to support the worms, the researchers will also design a matrix to house the living cells, determine which hormones and nutrients are needed, and establish appropriate fluid flow rates for the microfluidic devices to recreate the hydrodynamic forces the worms encounter in the body. The devices will be integrated into an optical platform that would allow researchers to quantify the activity of the worms over extended periods of time using automated image analysis algorithms.

Beyond studying lymphatic filariasis, Dixon believes a lymphatic system on a chip could ultimately support broader areas of research into disorders of this bodily system. The human lymphatic system has historically been underappreciated and is challenging to study because it is difficult to image, the vessels involved are small and the flow rates are very low compared to blood vasculature.

About Grand Challenges Explorations
Grand Challenges Explorations is a $100 million initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Launched in 2008, over 800 people in more than 50 countries have received Grand Challenges Explorations grants. The grant program is open to anyone from any discipline and from any organization. The initiative uses an agile, accelerated grant-making process with short two-page online applications and no preliminary data required. Initial grants of $100,000 are awarded two times a year. Successful projects have the opportunity to receive a follow-on grant of up to $1 million.

Research News
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Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986)(jtoon@gatech.edu).

As a member of the program, Boeing will connect to the faculty expertise and highly trained students and graduates of the center as well as an international network of partners in the field of organic photonics and electronics. This includes information on the latest research and discoveries and invitations to exclusive events.

“We’ve joined this center to have access to the state of the art conductive and electro-active technology base that has been assembled at Georgia Tech,” said Patrick Kinlen of Boeing Research & Technology Materials, Processes & Structures Technologies. “This technology has impact for Boeing in the area of conductive coatings, photovoltaics, electrochromics and energy storage.”

“COPE is extremely pleased to count Boeing among its industrial affiliates,” said Bernard Kippelen, Georgia Tech director of the center. “Having a company with a long tradition of aerospace leadership and innovation like The Boeing Company join our center speaks for the strong potential that COPE’s technological innovations can have in the future of commercial jetliners, and in defense, space and security applications.”     

Boeing is the world’s largest aerospace company and leading manufacturer of commercial jetliners and defense, space and security systems. A top U.S. exporter, the company supports airlines and U.S. and allied government customers in 150 countries. Boeing products and tailored services include commercial and military aircraft, satellites, weapons, electronic and defense systems, launch systems, advanced information and communications systems, and performance-based logistics and training.

Boeing Research & Technology is the advanced, central research and development organization of Boeing. It provides innovative technologies that enable the development of future aerospace solutions while improving the cycle time, cost, quality and performance of current aerospace products and services. 

Cambridge NanoTech delivers ALD systems capable of depositing ultra-thin films that are used in a wide variety of research and industrial applications. As a member of the program, Cambridge NanoTech will connect to the faculty expertise and highly trained student and graduates of the Center as well as an international network of industrial partners in the field of organic photonics and electronics.  This includes access to the latest research and discoveries in this emerging field.

“By approaching material science development through the use of fundamental techniques such as Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD), scientists and engineers are able to improve device performance and produce novel applications” explained Ganesh Sundaram, Vice President of Technology at Cambridge NanoTech. “ALD is capable of depositing flexible, multi-functional materials at low deposition temperatures, which is ideal when integrating these materials into organic electronics and photonics.”

Cambridge NanoTech first introduced ALD systems nine years ago and has an install base of over 300 systems on six continents. Cambridge NanoTech’s ALD systems have become an important strategic solution for researchers and manufacturers that require highly conformal and uniform thin film oxides, nitrides, sulfides, and metals.

Dr. Sundaram added “Unquestionably, organic electronics and photonics is an emerging field that is rapidly growing and we are excited to join the Industrial Affiliates Program so that we can participate in finding applications that meld the areas of ALD and organic science.”

Bernard Kippelen, Director of the Center stated, “Our Center has pioneered the use of ALD in organic field-effect transistors and has been able to achieve excellent stability in such devices using a Cambridge NanoTech ALD system. We are looking forward to this strategic partnership to continue to advance the science and engineering of ALD and broaden its application spectrum.”