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PhD Thesis Proposal Seminar

K-307 Auditorium (3-6408), University of Rochester Medical Center

“Silicon Nanomembranes as an Enabling Platform for Multifunctional Microsystems”

Presented by: Greg Madejski
Supervised by: Prof. James McGrath

Microsystem technology is invaluable in healthcare as it creates useful information efficiently through the miniaturization of sensors, fluidics, and machinery. However, there are problems miniaturizing microsystem elements that use many different technologies to achieve their function. Electrical leads, sensors, and flow channels rely on different materials, manufacturing flows, and do not scale down with the same behavior, while microfluidic systems suffer from the lack of efficiency introduced by extraneous dead volume. A generalizable microsystem platform that could overcome these challenges would be desirable.

We submit that silicon nanomembrane technology can serve as a miniaturization platform to integrate biomedical devices. The advent of silicon nanomembrane technology has created unique opportunities for localizing filtration, shear free microfluidics, pumps, and mixers (unpublished) to scalable chip formats. Our goals in this proposal are to demonstrate the flexibility of the nanomembrane platform to solve problems in the design of biomedical microsystems (Aims 1 and 2) and to demonstrate the ability of the nanomembrane platform to perform multiple functions (Aim 3).

Aim 1 – Fabrication of Nanomembrane Tented Structures to Extend the Lifetime of Delicate Sensing Devices
Aim 2 – Fabrication of Raman-Silent Nanomembranes to Enable the Chemical Fingerprinting of Cellular Components by Raman Spectroscopy
Aim 3 – Integration of Nanomembrane Operations to Create a Multilmodal Measurement System for the Study of Water Transport through Retinal Epithelial Monolayers