(2hp) A Computationally Assisted Approach for Designing Wearable Biosensors Toward Non-Invasive Personalized Molecular Analysis

Research Interests: Wearable sweat sensors have the potential to revolutionize precision medicine as they can non-invasively collect molecular information closely associated with an individual's health status. However, the majority of clinically relevant biomarkers cannot be continuously detected in situ using existing wearable approaches. Molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) are a promising candidate to address this challenge but haven't yet gained widespread use due to their complex design and optimization process yielding variable selectivity. Here, QuantumDock is introduced, an automated computational framework for universal MIP development toward wearable applications. QuantumDock utilizes density functional theory to probe molecular interactions between monomers and the target/interferent molecules to optimize selectivity, a fundamentally limiting factor for MIP development toward wearable sensing. A molecular docking approach is employed to explore a wide range of known and unknown monomers, and to identify the optimal monomer/cross-linker choice for subsequent MIP fabrication. Using an essential amino acid phenylalanine as the exemplar, experimental validation of QuantumDock is performed successfully using solution-synthesized MIP nanoparticles coupled with ultraviolet–visible spectroscopy. Moreover, a QuantumDock-optimized graphene-based wearable device is designed that can perform autonomous sweat induction, sampling, and sensing. For the first time, wearable non-invasive phenylalanine monitoring is demonstrated in human subjects toward personalized healthcare applications.

Teaching Interests: Since early high school I have had a passion for teaching and instruction. I became a math and physics tutor mostly to help friends who struggled with their work and due to my love of the subject. Over time I fell in love with helping others understand the subject thoroughly. This was the first way I could show other people what made these subjects so beautiful and just how our understanding of them could change engineering, and how we interact with the world forever. I continued to follow this passion through my undergraduate and graduate training as a teaching assistant, and now as a mentor to my fellow lab mates. I aspire to become a teacher so I can share this passion both inside the classroom, and in the laboratory where groundbreaking innovation occurs. I plan to do so in the same way I have since starting my teaching journey, showing students the beauty and simplicity behind the fundamental theories we work with and guiding them to see exactly how these principles can be used to revolutionize the technologies that support the world around us.