Event
CHBE Seminar Series: Benjamin Shapiro
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Room 2110 Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Bldg.
Professor Ray Adomaitis
adomaiti@umd.edu
Control of Small Things: From Steering Cells & Quantum Dots on Chip to Magnetically Manipulating Nanoparticles to In-Vivo Target
Benjamin Shapiro
Associate Professor
Fischell Department of Bioengineering and
Institute for Systems Research
Affiliate, Maryland NanoCenter
University of Maryland, College Park
Feedback flow control allows robust and surprisingly precise manipulation of objects in micro-fluidic systems. It enables simple micro-fluidic devices to steer and trap one and multiple cells to single micron accuracy, to control the motion of live swimming microbes, to manipulate quantum dots to nanometer precision, and to simultaneously control both the position and orientation of nano-rods and wires. Applications include manipulating cells in complex dirty samples for disease diagnosis and creating multi-dot quantum information systems. This talk will describe tools and methods we have developed for control of miniaturized fluidic systems - from physical first-principles modeling, to phrasing control tasks as tractable mathematical problems, to control design and experimental demonstrations.
Our ability to control particles in devices is expanding towards control of magnetic nano-particles in-vivo. Here the goal is to magnetically control therapeutic nano-particles to direct medicine to regions of disease in the body. Our control design ranges from magnet geometry optimization (a static system to magnetically inject nano-particles, all other magnet systems can only pull particles) to a long-term goal to dynamically control magnets to direct chemotherapy to deep tissue tumors. Modeling and experimental results will be presented for magnetic injection and steering of a ferrofluid droplet ex-vivo. From this, we will show initial control results that can focus a distributed ferrofluid to deep targets - a first step towards extending current magnetic drug delivery to allow focusing of chemotherapy to deep tissue tumors.
