Graduate students Yuzhe Ding and Arnold Chen, and undergraduate Eric Huang, in Tingrui Pan’s lab, have been selected as one of the US teams to compete with finalists from more than 20 countries in the 2012 International Contest of Applications in Nano-Micro Technologies (iCAN’12), to be held in Beijing, China, July 6-9.  For their project, “Multiplexed Microfluidic-Ribbon Printing”, the team created a non-contact printing platform using a dot-matrix printer head with replaceable microfluidic-ribbon devices, which enables large-scale, arbitrary two-dimensional micropattern generation.

Compared to conventional patterning techniques, the team’s method has several unique features, including crosstalk elimination, high yield and reliable reprint capacity, CAD-assisted arbitrary pattern generation, and extremely low cost. This novel printing technique can be potentially used in different research and industry fields, including cell biology, tissue engineering, combinatorial chemistry, and material science.

Last year, another team from Dr. Pan’s lab, composed of two BME undergrads (Ryan Harake, Karan Sandhu) and two graduate students (Baoqing Nie, Siyuan Xing) won second prize ($2000) in the 2011 iCAN contest. The team’s project was “AcouSense- a Telemedical Sensing Platform for Sleep Apnea Monitoring”. The platform provides portable, inexpensive and continuous monitoring for the sleep apnea disorders.

The International Contest of Application in Nano-micro Technology (iCAN) is the first international youth innovation contest in micro/nano fields. The mission of iCAN’12 is to promote the innovative spirits of youth, to construct a collaboration platform between academy and industry, to accelerate the applications of nano-micro technology and to educate the young generation in high-tech research and development.