Abstract:

Emerging healthcare needs and initiatives, including global health crisis, personalized medicine, and point-of-care applications are demanding breakthrough advancements in diagnostic tools. Biosensors play an essential role in bioanalytics, but traditional methods are limited in precision, affordability, integration or portability. Furthermore, they require long detection times, sophisticated infrastructure, and trained personnel. Our research group addresses these challenges by developing next-generation nanophotonic biosensors, spectroscopy and bioimaging technologies. Our lab’s expertise covers a variety of techniques, including nanophotonics, nanofabrication, microfluidics, surface chemistry, and data science. We exploit nanoplasmonics and metasurfaces, which can confine light below the fundamental diffraction limit and generate strong electromagnetic fields at nanometric volumes for increasing light-matter interaction and sensitivity. We develop new nanofabrication methods for high-throughput and low-cost manufacturing of nanophotonic chips. We integrate our sensors with microfluidic systems for sample handling. We also use smart data science tools with hyperspectral and bioimaging to achieve high device performance. In this talk, I will present some of our recent work and provide their prospects in biomedical and clinical applications.