4/27/2017
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MatSE is honored to have had three students represented as Illinois Scholars Undergraduate Research (ISUR) Scholars for 2016-17: senior Grace Pakeltis, sophomore Christopher Plantz, and sophomore Whitney Tso. The ISUR program facilitates opportunities to expand students' academic experience beyond the walls of the traditional classroom.
Grace Pakeltis
During the poster session for the ISUR symposium, Grace was able to present on Wireless Neural Implantable Needles for Optogenetics. According to Grace, the main motivation for the research stemmed from the need for a better way to image deep neural activity. With current fluorescence imaging, there are currently too many cables and wires that create noise on the reading and limit movement in the subject, making full understanding difficult. Grace has been working on this research sporadically since her freshman year.
“The devices we have fabricated address many of the limitations as they are of a smaller, ‘injectable’ photometry platform… [that is] ultra thin and flexible… allowing for minimally invasive implantation,” Grace said. “This platform is paired with wireless power delivery and data communication schemes… [this] has the potential for widespread applications in neuroscience.”
Christopher Plantz
Christopher presented on the Synthesis and Processing of Cyclic Polyphthalaldehyde Fibers. Christopher said Cyclic Polyphthalaldehyde, or cPPA, is a stimuli-responsive polymer that depolymerizes on-demand and has been used as a transient substrate for self-destructing electronics. He explained there is a host material and sacrificial material used; the sacrificial material will degrade and create a micro-channel for fluid delivery. His group used a dry spinning method for spinning cPPA fibers, however future work will investigate wet spinning that will utilize coagulation baths to improve solvent extraction and fiber morphology.
Whitney Tso
Whitney’s poster presented her research on Fabrication of Complex Refractory Oxides and their Melting Points. Refractory oxides have very high melting points. A large array of samples were fabricated in order to understand how the atomic structure affects the melting points of the compounds and determine the phase equilibria, with the main focus of the research being the actual fabrication. Using the steric entrapment method, designed and patented by materials science and engineering Professor Waltraud Kriven in 2008, samples were synthesized using low energy with high chemical homogeneity, mixing on the atomic scale. All these factors helped achieve equilibrium faster than traditional processing methods.
Semiconductor Research Corporation and Intel were sponsor for each MatSE ISUR scholar.