Active Materials and Devices for Biomedical and Environmental Applications

Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss our recent work in materials fabrication, manipulation, assembly, and manufacturing tailored towards biomedical and environmental applications. The focus is on active materials and devices enabled by materials control across a wide range of length scales. At the nanoscale, I will discuss 3D electrokinetic tweezers, an ultra-precision tool developed in my lab, which can be used to manipulate nanowires in room-temperature aqueous solutions. With this technique, designed nanostructures are maneuvered as untethered robotic tools for probing single biological cells; the precision reaches 20 nm in position and 0.5° in orientation in water solution with a standard microscope. At a slightly larger, chip-scale, I will describe a recent innovation that permits the light-controlled patterning of soft actuators made of microbubbles, which assemble large arrays of nanoparticles in parallel. The co-assembly of nanosensor-cell hybrids can be further achieved that detect metabolites of bacterial cells. Finally, I will discuss a rational approach for growing large-scale hierarchically porous superstructures with pore sizes ranging from 100 nm to 100 um and their application in water purification.

Bio: D. Emma Fan is a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Materials Science and Engineering Program and the Texas Materials Institute at The University of Texas at Austin. She holds the Robert & Jane Mitchell Endowed Faculty Fellowship in Engineering at UT-Austin since 2017 and received two prestigious awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the NSF Mid-Career Advancement Award (2022) and the NSF CAREER Award (2012). Dr. Fan is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2021), an invited Official Nominator of the Japan Prize since 2017. She is also a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) elected for class 2024. Dr. Fan is an inventor of eight granted patents and a few pending patents. One patent has been licensed to a startup company. She will serve as a General Chair for the International Conference on Manipulation, Automation Robotics at Small Scales (MARSS) hotel in Delft, Netherlands in 2024