Sensor Chemistry; Materials, Interfaces and Integrated Designs

Our research focuses on the development and integration of multimodal sensing and biosensing platforms both in terms of the transduction mechanism (e.g., piezoelectric, electrochemical, optical, and impedance transducers) as well as the sensing materials and interfaces with the aim to achieve higher reliability in sensing for critical real world scenarios. Such integration has significant figures of merits such as sensitivity, selectivity, and portability. Particularly, the areas of application include the biological cells based analytical systems (e.g., the cell-cell interactions, carbohydrate-protein interactions for diagnostics and therapeutics of various diseases such as cancers and bacterial infections) and also the stand-off detection of explosives and other explosive/hazardous gases (e.g., TATP, TNT, Methane, VOCs etc.). All these areas of interest and many others in the field of sensing have the potential of enhancing the quality of life, and in many cases, of saving the human lives.

Summary of Top Achievements:

1.      Establishment of the ionic liquid materials and their composites as orthogonal transduction platforms for the electrochemical, piezoelectric, and optical readouts for sensor applications in explosives and gas detection systems.

2.      Establishment the glycosylated conducting polymers as multimodal interfaces for studying carbohydrate-protein interactions which are the basis of various pathogen detections and their susceptibility assays.

3.      Study the cell-cell interactions and antibody-cell interactions using the sensing systems for the understanding of cancer occurrence, diagnostics, and therapeutic protocols in real-time.

4.      Development and prototype integration of multi-sensor arrays including the inclusion of multidimensional data analysis protocols using software such as Systat, Pirouette, Matlab for many real world applications with the potential of device fabrication.