Event
Bioengineering Seminar Series: Benjamin Shapiro
Friday, September 4, 2009
11:00 a.m.
Lecture Hall, 1105 Jeong H. Kim Engineering Bldg.
Prefessor Adam Hsieh
hsieh@umd.edu
Control of Small Things: From Steering Cells on Chips to Targeting Drugs to Deep Tumors
Presented by Benjamin Shapiro
Associate Professor, Aerospace Engineering
University of Maryland
My group is interested in applying control to miniaturized systems, control for electronic, biological, and medical applications. I will show results on using micro-scale flow control to precisely steer objects on chip. Here simple micro-fluidic devices can steer and trap one and multiple cells to single micron accuracy. Recently we have demonstrated manipulation of even swimming cells, we can position them to any location, steer them along any desired path as they continue to swim, let them go, and recapture them; and we can now manipulate single quantum dots to nanometer accuracy. Applications include manipulating cells in complex dirty samples for disease diagnosis and creating multi-dot quantum information systems.
Our ability to control particles in devices is expanding towards control of nano-particles in-vivo. Here the goal is to magnetically control therapeutic nano-particles to direct medicine to where it needs to go in the body. Control ranges from the fairly simple, a system to magnetically inject nano-particles (all other magnet systems can only pull particles), to very sophisticated -- for cancer treatment our goal is to dynamically control magnets to direct chemotherapy to deep tumor regions. I will show initial results ranging from experimental demonstration of the MIS (the magnetic injector system), to experimental manipulation of a drop of magnetic fluids ex-vivo, to control design and simulations for deep tumor targeting.
About the Speaker
Dr. Benjamin Shapiro received his bachelors degree from the Aerospace Engineering department at Georgia Tech, and his PhD from the Control and Dynamical Systems option at Caltech. He has been at the university of Maryland for 9 years. His research is focused on modeling, design, and control of micro-scale systems for chemical, biological, and now clinical applications. His primary appointment is currently with the Aerospace department, he has a joint appointment with the Institute for Systems Research, the Nano-center, and is affiliated with the Bio-Engineering Department and the Applied Math and Scientific Computation program. He is the recipient of a 2003 NSF CAREER award, has filed 16 patents (two of which were awarded 1st and 3rd places as inventions of the year at Maryland), and is a Fulbright scholar (to Germany). He was born in Jerusalem, Israel in 1973.
