MechE Colloquium: Nanophotonics: Enabling Technology for Next-Generation Biosensors

If you would like to attend the talk in BM 5202, please register here (on a first-come, first-served basis). This allows us to limit the number of people in the room and to satisfy contact tracing requirements.

For remote attendance: Zoom link


Abstract:
New health initiatives with global healthcare, precision medicine and point-of-care diagnostics are demanding breakthrough developments in biosensing and bioanalytical tools. Current biosensors are lacking precision, bulky, and costly, as well as they require long detection times, sophisticated infrastructure and trained personnel, which limit their application areas. My laboratory is focused on to address these challenges by exploiting novel optical phenomena at nanoscale and engineering toolkits such as nanophotonics, nanofabrication, microfluidics and data science. In particular, we use photonic nanostructures based on plasmonics and dielectric metasurfaces that can confine light below the fundamental diffraction limit and generate strong electromagnetic fields in nanometric volumes. In this talk I will present how we exploit nanophotonics and combine it with imaging, biology, chemistry and data science techniques to achieve high performance biosensors. I will introduce ultra-sensitive Mid-IR biosensors based on surface enhanced infrared spectroscopy for chemical specific detection of molecules, large-area chemical imaging and real-time monitoring of protein conformations in aqueous environment. Next, I will describe our effort to develop ultra-compact, portable, rapid and low-cost microarrays and their use for early disease diagnostics in real-world settings. Finally, I will highlight label-free optofluidic biosensors that can perform one-of-a-kind measurements on live cells down to the single cell level, and provide their prospects in biomedical and clinical applications.

Bio:
Hatice Altug is professor in the Institute of Bioengineering at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland since 2013. She is also director of EPFL Doctoral School in Photonics. Between 2007 and 2013 she has been professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Boston University, U.S. She received her Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University (U.S.) in 2007 and her B.S. in Physics from Bilkent University (Turkey) in 2000. Prof. Altug is the recipient of European Physical Society Emmy Noether Distinction, Optical Society of America Adolph Lomb Medal, and U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, which is the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on outstanding scientists and engineers in their early career. She received European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant, ERC Proof of Concept Grant, U.S. Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Massachusetts Life Science Center New Investigator Award, IEEE Photonics Society Young Investigator Award. She is the winner of the Inventors’ Challenge competition of Silicon Valley in 2005. She has been named to Popular Science Magazine’s "Brilliant 10" list in 2011.