College of Engineering Faculty Members Receive Prestigious NSF CAREER Awards
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Three outstanding young College of Engineering faculty have received grants from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program this spring. The three award-winning researchers are Robert Niffenegger of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), Jinglei Ping of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE), and Govind Srimathveeravalli of MIE.
Srimathveeravalli CAREER research, supported by the NSF for $$558,436 for five years, is titled “Modulating endothelial cell function using targeted electrical stimulation.”
The endothelial cells lining our blood vessels become dysfunctional during cancer and some non-malignant diseases, thus interfering with drug delivery, triggering inflammation, and slowing healing. To resolve this critical issue, Srimathveeravalli seeks to develop a novel approach for modulating endothelial-cell function by using pulsed electric fields, or ultrashort electrical waveforms in which each pulse is a few microseconds long. In the process, his method will also focus drug delivery to tumors and speed up the healing process for such maladies
One example of this problem is our aging population. As the number of elderly people mushrooms, there has been a dramatic increase in patients diagnosed with non-metastatic but locally advanced tumors. These patients cannot be surgically treated due to their advanced age and/or co-morbidities, thus creating an urgent need for alternative treatments.
Srimathveeravalli’s new approach offers a solution to this challenge and many more chronic health issues, such as diabetic ulcers that affect this demographic, in which the endothelial cells lining the blood vessels play a major role.
As Srimathveeravalli explains, “The objective of this CAREER proposal is to tackle this important question by developing a technology for the targeted stimulation of endothelial cells using pulsed electric fields that can be delivered to the desired region of the body using minimally invasive medical devices [developed in the Srimathveeravalli lab].”
Srimathveeravalli believes that developing devices to deliver pulsed electric fields, which can directly restore the function of endothelial cells during disease, will produce powerful new tools for targeted drug delivery to tumors and overcome many limitations of existing technologies. This NSF-supported research will do just that. According to Srimathveeravalli, “The [CAREER] project will study pulsed-electric-field waveforms that enable controlled and specific alteration of the endothelial-cell barrier function, identify the biological pathways that mediate this response, and test this approach for enhancing drug delivery to tumors.”
Srimathveeravalli adds that the novel devices, tools, and knowledge gained from his CAREER research can also support new investigations into the role of endothelial cells in various diseases and improve treatment outcomes for countless cancer patients as well as those with non-malignant tumors.
Ping’s CAREER research, supported by the NSF for $550,000 for five years, is titled “Highly Rapid and Sensitive Nanomechanoelectrical Detection of Nucleic Acids.”
The amplification-free electronic detection of genetic materials holds significant promise for advancing the point-of-care diagnostics of numerous diseases. The problem, however, is that current, state-of-the-art, all-electrical methods struggle to achieve high sensitivity and rapid detection simultaneously. Ping is seeking to address this vital problem by developing a trailblazing method for detecting genetic materials such as DNA and RNA by cleverly combining high sensitivity with speed to overcome the shortcomings of existing techniques.
As Ping explains, “The project will lead to compact, quick, accurate, and user-friendly devices for genetic-material detection. These devices operate by measuring the electrical responses of multiple genetic materials when they vibrate in an external electric field.” One goal of Ping’s proposed research is to boost both the sensitivity and time efficiency of nucleic-acid detection by two orders of magnitude. According to Ping, such innovation “promises to enhance pandemic management and global healthcare.”
Ping’s research departs from the status quo of electrical, nucleic-acid sensors, which directly convert the occurrence of probe-target, nucleic-acid hybridization into electrical response. Instead, Ping aims to harness a new pathway he has already developed for nano-mechano-electrical “transduction,” or the conversion of mechanical vibration into electrochemical signals.
Technically, the expected outcomes of this project are twofold. First, Ping and his team will achieve a comprehensive understanding of the nano-mechano-electrical transduction principle for maximizing the multiplexity, selectivity, and sensitivity in nucleic-acid detection. Secondly, the team will achieve rapid, high-sensitivity, nucleic-acid detection by integrating nano-mechano-electrical transduction with microscale transversal “electrophoresis,” the term used to describe the motion of particles in a gel or fluid within a relatively uniform electric field.
Ping expects these outcomes “to generate significant positive impact on bioengineering advancement and rapid, accurate, point-of-care, nucleic-acid testing.”
Niffenegger’s CAREER research, supported by the NSF for $624,196 for five years, is aimed at developing revolutionary integrated technologies for trapped ion qubits.
“Trapped ions are used in the most powerful quantum computers in the world and for the most precise optical clocks in the world,” says Niffenegger. “They have been a foundational platform for quantum science going back almost fifty years. Yet, their underlying hardware hasn’t changed much in that time. This project aims to change that.”
Trapped ions are charged atomic particles, which, due to this charge, can be trapped and controlled by electric fields. Then laser beams can be used to precisely control their atomic states, turning them into qubits or clocks/sensors.
According to Niffenegger, “Developing trapped-ion quantum processors with integrated photonics and other integrated technologies like electronics and detectors may enable the next generation of quantum hardware towards large-scale quantum computers and practical applications.” Integrated photonics is a rapidly advancing field that combines optics and nanofabrication to create integrated circuits for optical light.
One key aspect of Niffenegger’s NSF research concerns the “qubit,” which (according to the IBM website) is “the basic unit of information used to encode data in quantum computing and can be best understood as the quantum equivalent of the traditional bit used by classical computers to encode information in binary.”
As Niffenegger explains, current quantum technologies have been saturated at a handful of qubits with hardware that isn’t scalable to thousands or millions of qubits. As he says, “To realize operational quantum advantage for computing, and to improve precision for sensing, timekeeping, and fundamental physics measurements, the number of trapped ions in these systems must be scaled up. Yet, this would require laboratories full of sensitive, complex equipment, limiting the portability, scalability, and accessibility of these systems.”
In his NSF proposal, Niffenegger offers an alternative and transformational approach that combines trapped-ion quantum research with integrated-photonics research to solve these problems. “The ultimate goal is to create a full quantum system-on-a-chip that could be used for both quantum computing applications and quantum sensing applications,” says Niffenegger.
(April 2024)