Biological Photonic Crystal Sensors: Materials, Applications, and Fusion with Machine Learning

IQSE AMO QO Seminar Series

Pizza will be served for IQSE members at 11:00 am. The talk will start around 11:30 am.

Speaker: Dr. Alan Wang

Venue: IQSE SEMINAR ROOM (MPHY 578)

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Alan Wang joined Baylor University in August 2022. He received his B.S. degree from Tsinghua University, and an M.S. degree from the Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, P.R. China, in 2000 and 2003, respectively, and his Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2006. From 2007 to 2011, he was with Omega Optics, Inc., Austin, Texas, where he served as the chief research scientist for multiple federal funded Small Business Innovation Research projects. From August 2011 to July 2022, he was an Assistant Professor to Full Professor at Oregon State University in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, leading the Engineering Photonics Research Laboratory (EPRL) to develop cutting-edge photonic materials and devices research. He has more than 110 journal articles and 120 conference publications, including numerous invited and plenary presentations. He holds seven U.S. patents and is a senior member of IEEE, SPIE and OSA.

EVENT DETAILS: Diatoms are microalgae with unique photonic crystal structures, which can be found in every habitat where water is present. Their abundance and wide distribution make them ideal materials for a wide range of applications as living organisms. We have developed hybrid diatom photonic crystals with plasmonic nanoparticles (NPs) as ultra-sensitive, low-cost substrates for surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) sensing. The enhancement comes from the photonic crystal enhancement of diatom frustules that could improve the hot-spots of plasmonic NPs. Recently, we reported the unique micro-fluidic flow, analyte concentration effect, and thin layer chromatography (TLC) on diatom biosilica, which enables selection, separation, detection, and analysis of complex chemical and biological samples. Especially, we developed a lab-on-a-chip technology based on TLC-SERS sensing and successfully applied it to various applications including food safety, illicit drug residue sensing, and biomarker detection. As a relatively new analytical tool, SERS techniques face tremendous challenges in quantitative sensing due to the intrinsic variation of the enhancement factors. In the last topic, we will discuss our efforts of applying machine learning including support vector regression and convolutional neural network to analyze the data collected by diatom photonic crystal biosensors, which showed superior performance in quantitative sensing.   

ZOOM information:

https://tamu.zoom.us/j/98156251523?pwd=QVdSdGxtL1UyY0g1L083SU5QR0QrUT09

Meeting ID: 981 5625 1523
Passcode: 297578

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