EECS Seminar: Interface of Physics, Engineering and Medicine - The Next Big Thing is at the Nanoscale

McDonnell Douglas Engineering Auditorium
Giuseppe Strangi, Ph.D.

Professor of Physics and Ohio Research Scholar
Department of Physics, Case Western Reserve University
Case Comprehensive Cancer Center

Abstract: In the last decade, nanotechnologies and biomedicine have reached remarkable levels of integration and cross-fertilization aiming to address unmet clinical needs by designing functional materials and transformative technologies for precision medicine. This seminar will review how we harness light-matter interaction at the nanoscale to design artificial materials with fascinating properties mainly originating by form-function relationships.

Among several others, hybrid nano-carriers, viral cargos and plasmonic metamaterials represent only a small fraction of a large variety of systems proposed to achieve local drug-delivery, photo-thermal and photodynamic therapies, high-resolution imaging and sensing, stimulating specific immune response to treat and monitor neurodegenerative diseases and cancers. In this context, we have developed miniaturized plasmonic biosensor platforms that outperform current sensing technologies and are based on hyperbolic metamaterials that support highly confined bulk plasmon modes. Recent opto-genetic research activities based on neuroplasmonics approaches will be discussed. This research is a major scientific and technological challenge that will revolutionize our capability of managing and exploiting neuronal circuits.

Bio: Giuseppe Strangi (http://physics.case.edu/faculty/giuseppe-strangi/) is professor of physics and Ohio research scholar in surfaces of advanced materials at Case Western Reserve University. He leads the Nanoplasm Labs (http://nanoplasm.case.edu) at CWRU Cleveland and is senior scientist of the National Research Council (CNR- Italy). Strangi is president of the Scientific Committee of the Foundation “Con il Cuor,e” a national foundation that supports cancer research in Europe, and he is the general chair of the International Conference – NANOPLASM “New Frontiers in Plasmonics and Nanophotonics.” Strangi's research interests include condensed matter physics, nanophotonics and plasmonics of electromagnetic materials and cancer nanotechnology. He is a fellow of the Institute of Science of the Origins and of the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center (CWRU). In 1997 he was awarded the E. Majorana Fellowship (INFM), Natta Outstanding Teacher Award (MIUR 2007), Filottete Prize (2015), International Prize ‘Il Faro’ (2016), and Premio Legambiente (2016).