Description | Speaker's Website Host: Assoc Prof. Amy Shen, Dept of Mechanical Engineering Prof. Karl F Böhringer, Dept. of Electrical Engineering "Microneedles for Biomedical Applications" Microneedles are biomedical microdevices that provide a pathway across the skin barrier to exchange fluids or compounds with the body for drug delivery or biosensing. The effectiveness of microneedles for transdermal drug delivery has been demonstrated in clinical trials, and it has been shown that this drug delivery method can be painless. Dr. Stoeber's group has developed several inexpensive fabrication processes based on solvent casting to fabricate arrays of hollow microneedles from polymer composites or from metal. Solvent casting leads to polymer microstructures on a mold surface as the solvent evaporates from a polymer solution. This solvent casting process involves interesting flow physics inside the sub-milimeter thick fluid film during solvent evaporation, where evaporation-driven flow induces vortices in the corners of the mold. A full understanding of this flow phenomenon will allow designing the solvent casting process to achieve particular needle shapes. A MEMS-based concept for a continuous glucose monitor has been developed that uses microneedles and an integrated electrochemical sensor to monitor the glucose level of diabetic patients over several days. Boris Stoeber received the electrical engineering Diploma from the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany, in 1998, the general engineering Diploma from the École Centrale de Lyon, Ecully, France, in 1998, and the Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2002. From 2003 to 2005, he was a Postdoctoral Scientist in chemical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 2005, he has been with the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, where he is an Associate Professor. He is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Sensors Journal and the Canada Research Chair in Microfluidics and Sensing Technology. |
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