Date/Time
Date(s) - 02/05/2016
9:30 am

Multi-Scale, Warfighter-Centric Biomedical Sensing

This presentation will frame several of the problems warfighters encounter and provide examples of technologies and systems to address these challenges at multiple scales. In the first example, I will discuss traumatic lower-limb musculoskeletal injuries, which are pervasive in the military and compounded by the fact that many warfighters return to duty prior to fully healing, increasing a predisposition for additional injuries and chronic pain. Using a murine model of trauma and integrative genomic profiling of tissues and single cells, a robust method to quantitatively track the regenerative potential of an individual’s muscle after injury was developed. This set of technologies will also be discussed in the context of profiling single immune cells and induced pluripotent stem cells. In the second example, I will introduce the engineering and use of solid-state nanopores, which are single-molecule sensors that can study the structure and properties of single nucleic acids and proteins with high resolution in a portable format. Two applications of these sensors (ultrafast DNA sizing for forensic analysis and in-situ quality control of gene synthesis reactions) will be highlighted. These two research applications provide pathways to obtain information on biopolymers in a rapid, inexpensive format and may ultimately provide foundations to discover and engineer new diagnostics and therapeutics.