Research

1. Sticker Electronics (StickTronics)

We pioneer a new class of sticker-like electronics, or StickTronics, that are flexibly attachable to curvilinear surfaces of arbitrary places. The StickTronics are thin and deformable, enabling a variety of pragmatic applications spanning from curved displays to wearable biomedical devices. 

2. Wearable Biomedical Devices

We design and engineer wearable biomedical devices tailored for the skin to address clinical needs of particular urgent concerns. We actively interact with clinicians, patients, and caregivers to identify all aspects of challenges that arise in current clinical settings. We explore a set of functional materials, product designs, and manufacturing schemes to produce prototype devices for their subsequent clinical evaluations in the field of healthcare, rehabilitation, and telemedicine.

3. Smart Soft Contact Lenses

We design and engineer smart soft contact lenses for continuous remote assessment of ocular health and chronic diseases. These devices are built upon various commercial brands of soft contact lenses that offer ergonomic designs to safely fit a variety of corneal shapes and sizes in human eyes. The pragmatic applicaiton of these devices is boundless ranging from (1) at-home management of chronic ocular diseases such as glaucoma to (2) painless ocular drug delivery and to (3) contact lens research and development. 

4. Injectable Nanoneedle Devices

We design and engineer vertically ordered arrays of silicon nanoneedles on flexible and biodegradable patches, which are injectable into living cells and tissues in a minimally invasive manner. The nanoneedles enable the tracking, mapping, and navigating of what happens inside of cells and tissues under being used for drug screening, chemical analysis, or current research for better understanding of the COVID-19 virus and mutations. We pursue not only the fundamental scientific studies of cellular behaviors but also technical efforts to create injectable nanoneedle devices for painless and long-term sustained drug delivery to specific organs of particular interests.