Young Kim, an associate professor of biomedical engineering, received support of his work on silk-based fiber for fabrication of flexible and multifunctional nanomaterials fabrics for use as biosensing and therapeutic platforms. The materials could be used for battlefield environment sensing: soldier health monitoring, soldier therapeutics, and combat casualty care.

Kim will use the grant to study the light scattering properties of native silk in his Natural and Biological Photonics Lab. Like the highly packed nanostructures that make up a pearl or mother-of-pearl and create a unique silvery reflection, each silk fiber is composed of a large number of nanofibrils that both scatter light and can trap it inside the silk fiber. This nanoarchitecture allows for uniquely strong light-matter interaction and efficient nanomaterial hybridization.

“Our results will provide the groundwork for exploiting natural silk as a photonic nanomaterial hybridization platform to implement embedded functionalities in a fiber geometry, which can be constructed into large-area and continuous fabrics,” Kim says.

Chi Hwan Lee, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering, received support for his work developing flexible probes for use in neural sensing and interfacing on the brain. The probes consist of vertically ordered semiconducting silicon arrays that can transmit electrical signals with high signal-to-noise ratio.

Lee’s research group also focuses on diverse types of wearable biomedical devices for many promising applications such as intracellular monitoring nano-systems, personalized rehabilitation and smart healthcare systems, and therapeutic electronic contact lenses.

“We strongly believe that these studies will open up new possibilities for highly efficient novel interfaces in the bio/nano/3D electronics for electrical recording and stimulation at multiscale in a minimally non-invasive fashion, which cannot be achievable by exploiting existing sensing technologies,” Lee says.