Devin Brown was selected for the Best Student Poster Paper Award at the International Conference on Electron, Ion, and Photon Beam Technology and Nanofabrication (EIPBN). The conference was held May 28-31, 2019 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. 

Brown is a Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and he works full-time as a senior research engineer in the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology (IEN), where he is IEN’s electron beam lithography expert. 

The title of Brown’s award-winning poster is “Nanoscale Metallic Resistors in Soft Polymers.” His coauthors on the poster are ECE Professor and IEN Executive Director Oliver Brand, who serves as Brown’s advisor, and Mingu Kim, a recent Ph.D. graduate of Brand’s research group who is now a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. The work is the result of a collaboration with Associate Professor Wilbur Lam and Assistant Professor David Myers, both of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University; they are also co-authors on the poster.

This research investigates single cell mechanical analysis which can provide critical information into disease progress and therapy. Electrical sensing technologies and platforms that can analyze many cells in parallel are of interest in order to produce clinically relevant and statistically significant datasets. Considering the size of biological cells, such as a blood platelet diameter of ~2-3 μm, nanolithography techniques, such as electron-beam lithography, should be utilized for such nanoscale or submicron-scale sensing element fabrication. Moreover, the fabricated nanosensors are preferably embedded into soft polymers to more closely mimic the natural environment of the cells. 

Towards the goal of a soft, arrayed sensing platform for cell analysis, the research presents a fabrication method based on nanoscale metallic resistors using electron-beam lithography and a transfer process to soft polymeric substrates. A virtual presentation of Brown’s work can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY7BgZGfSWA&feature=youtu.be; run time for the video is less than five minutes.