Events

Brett Freidkes will defend his proposal, entitled: "A MEMS-Based Surface Stress Sensing System for Fluid Dynamics Applications" on Tuesday, March 12th at 1:00 PM in Larsen 234. Light refreshments will be provided. 

Liang Zhou will defend his proposal, entitled: "Electrothermal MEMS Mirrors and Lenses with Large Range and High Stiffness and Their Application in Two-photon Microscopy" on Thursday, February 7, at 3:00 PM in LAR 229.

Dr. Arnold’s group will have an open house on Friday 11/16 at 1:00 PM in the Magnetics lab (Larsen 126). The open house is an invitation to everyone in IMG to learn about the research, the projects, and the equipments of an IMG group. Some demos will be set up in the magnetic lab, and students will discuss about their projects.

• Nicolas Garraud: Electrodynamic wireless power transfer (EWPT).
• Keisha Castillo-Torres: Bio-applications of the rotational dynamics setup and magnetic microdiscs.
• Connor Smith: Vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM) general overview and demo.
• Yuzheng Wang: Characterization of electro-permanent magnet (EPM) samples using the VSM.
• Jacob Ewing: Screen-printed magnetic films for MEMS.

This week, the speakers for the IMG Seminar are:

• Dr. Chelsea Simmons on Cells as Microsystems
• Jacob Amontree (Dr. Fan's group) on Capillary Force Driven Single-Cell Spiking Apparatus for Studying Circulating Tumor Cell

Cells as Microsystems. Successful integration of MEMS with biomedicine requires an intimate understanding of biophysiological processes. Dr. Simmons will describe tools at the micro and mesoscale she uses to study these processes, including cells themselves! Specific applications in cancer and regeneration will be highlighted. 

Capillary Force Driven Single-Cell Spiking Apparatus for Studying Circulating Tumor Cell. The characterization of single cells within heterogeneous populations has great impact on both biomedical sciences and cancer research. By investigating cellular compositions on a broad scale, pertinent outliers may be lost in the sample set. Alternatively, an investigation focused on the behavior of specific cells, such as circulating tumor cells (CTCs), will reveal genetic biomarkers or phenotypic characteristics associated with cancer and metastasis. On average, CTC concentration in peripheral blood is extremely low, as few as one to two per billion of healthy blood cells. Consequently, the critical element lacking in many methods of CTC detection is accurate cell capture efficiency at low concentrations. To simulate CTC isolation, researchers usually spike small amounts of tumor cells to healthy blood for separation. However, spiking tumor cells at extremely low concentrations is challenging in a standard laboratory setting. We report our study on an innovative apparatus and method designed for low-cost, precise, and replicable single-cell spiking (SCS).