Rashid Bashir, Ph.D.
Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering and Head, Department of Bioengineering
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“Interfacing Engineering, Biology, and Medicine at the Micro and Nanoscale”

Integration of biology, medicine, and fabrication methods at the micro and nano scale offers tremendous opportunities for solving important problems in biology and medicine and to enable a wide range of applications in diagnostics, therapeutics, and tissue engineering. Microfluidics and Lab-on-Chip can be very beneficial to realize practical applications in detection of disease markers, counting of specific cells from whole blood, and for identification of pathogens, at point-of-care. The use of small sample size and electrical methods for sensitive analysis of target entities can result in easy to use, one-time-use assays that can be used at point-of-care. In this talk, we will present our work on detection of T cells for diagnostics of HIV AIDs for global health, development of a CBC (Complete Blood Cell) analysis on a chip, electrical detection of multiplexed nucleic acid amplification reactions, and detection of epigenetic markers on DNA at the single molecule level. While the above mentioned devices are built with PDMS or silicon, bio-printing with stereolithography can be a very powerful technology to produce bio-hybrid devices made of polymers and cells such as biological machines and soft robotics. These devices could have potential applications in drug delivery, power generation, and other biomimetic systems.

Location
1005 GBSF