one of the most exciting fields of modern science and engineering is head of technology and our distinguished guest seven years on solid says many potential solutions to medical and environmental associate editor of the i triple it transactions of biomedical circuits and systems and he serves on numerous committees in nanotechnology organizations i'd like to also mention and this give you a frog leg which is our no millimeters so this is the site the length scale we're looking at is smaller than a width of the human hair much much smaller than the so when i when i think of nanotechnology we can basically have a unit here which i call a not a particle so just to give you another perspective of how small i'm really looking at so this is one of the you take your ruler and if you take that smaller scale that you see a millimeter you divide this almost a million times that's how small we have basically looking at yet another perspective that's that's the elite of scale that we're looking at so the reason why we want to work in nanotechnology will be evident in the next few slides so when i talk about  where he talked about the promises of nanotechnology one particular chord in is the really long lecture that i like is the one that's mentioned here atoms on a small scale behave like nothing on a large scale for this satisfy the laws of quantum mechanics so as we go down and fiddle around with atoms down there we are working with different laws and we can expect to do different things now these exotic material properties of the nano scale holds great promise and he even though this was far ahead of his time he brought up many different unique ideas to  understand nanotechnology and how nanotechnology can benefit mankind so some of the nano effects that i would like to mention in particular are the quantum effects  this brings about very interesting properties for example in chemical reactions when you are looking at speeding up the rate of chemical reactions or increasing the kind it kicks of chemical reaction having more of the material to interact with the environment makes that quite beneficial the one that i also like in this will be very interesting to see smaller particles absorb and scatter light differently and this has been instrumental in realizing some of the wonderful effects that people have demonstrated with optical diagnostics optical communications and so on and also in one centimeters on its side it has a totally sick surfaces or it has a total surface rate of six centimeters square so if you're performing any kind of interaction or performing a chemical reaction you basically have access to it only six centimeter square of surface area with the environment but imagine that you break this up into smaller pieces no one millimeter on the side so you have and if you just sum up all the surface areas that you would see you would essentially now have almost sixty centimeters squared of surface area so the same volume of material but much more much more surface that essentially means you have much more material to interact with the environment taking this even further down if you e to interact with the environment so that essentially plays a role in for example think about making better catalysts right so catalysts are essentially elements that help chemical reactions changes the kind of fix of the chemical reactions so for example your catalytic converter in your car takes in the toxic fumes and makes it more or less harmless even though they're still pollutants but they're less harmless before the catalytic converters so if you you need these not all materials basically make it possible to do use of less of these catalysts two to can work another property as i mentioned is nanomaterials have very unique colors so this is an example you know when you look at gold for us it's all yellow and but that's just the b property of of of gold what happens if you go down the fly basically break this down into smaller and smaller pieces all the way down to nanometer do you still get as the mixing with with doing this high temperature molding process gives them these very exotic colors that still last today they will never bleach because this is structural color color that comes from the scientist and it is that basically talked about something called a space alien or something that would ferry materials from earth all the way down to satellites this is al almost hundred times stronger than steel it has been shown experimentally and they have been many groups which have shown of few tens and hundreds of meters of these it is a possibility it is a possibility to be able to connect things like weight with the cable that is that is the strong so some more examples of nanomaterials before i go into some of the research activities excitement about two dimensional nanomaterials what i mean by two dimensional materials and materials which are just one atom thick and they're basically two dimensional in nature so they are what we call to be materials a those not a materialist have very unique physical chemical biological and optical properties and they and people are just witnessing a lot of excitement in in this field of especially coming from a chemists and engineers who have been working together to make a lot of exciting development in the in this field personally i've been working with carbon based nanomaterials so these sed to using in our pencil does a three dimensional sort of a sort of an enema tyria so the question then becomes if you're looking at materials this small how do we actually make them and i would say that there are two ways of making them one is a top down approach and that dumb down approach is essentially you start with the bulk material and you start edging away pieces and till it gets smaller to the size of nanomaterials which is what transistors and all the electronic devices that you see today and so this this comes into this area called for uses optical techniques and masks just like traditional photography the difference is that  materials together without the need for expensive clean room and the need for very expensive facilities that we have today and some of these are just using chemistry you know group we've been working on this grand challenge of what we call smart and connected help so what what i mean by that is we want to be able to sense that environment  and also sense our own health and find any links between the two and that basically means that we should have sensing and diagnostic capabilities where we sense different parameters in the environment for example we should be able to make sensors or devices that can monitor whether they can monitor pollution that can monitor the water pour that the air quality food of home and wire meant our work environment and many diseases to be able to stay on top of those things at the same time we want to be able to screen for diseases like cancer or infectious diseases so to sort of have the ability make sure that these devices are low cost and they're not something that not just a developed nation is able to make and produce but also something that a resource poor nation is also able to do to make and do on their own so let me just give you a couple of examples from my lab there are plenty of occasions and i just wanted to bring this up just to give you a all kinds of hearing aids that provides us a sense of artificial hearing which is quite accurate but if you think about the other two senses the the sense of smell and the sense of tongue which essentially in compasses almost all of the environmental sensing a publication if you're a if you can sense the environment the pollutants in the air it's almost as if you're making a devise that is acting as an environmental laws and if you're detecting water quality it's almost as if you're trying to make an artificial paste or a pound that can taste you know what kind of pollutants you have in the water so the area of research you can basically classify  making electronic nose and tongue are plentiful so what are the requirements for making any electronic work of of a nose you have to have lots of sensing elements we have a lot of order  intelligence behind the sensing sensing elements second interesting characteristics of an electronic nose each of the sensing elements are cross reactive what i mean by that is these the of the nose we want to be able to me a platform that provides us with this very cross reactive sense and give the ability i just mentioned the machine learning and the pattern recognition which is the real brain behind the of the diversity of nanomaterials and each one of them having unique properties chemical properties the higher the activity because of the high surface to wall the ratio you could actually assembled these different nanomaterials in an array format where each sensing element responds to or target order or target gas in the environment and says these materials are different and they have these unique properties they will provide a very cross react also implement a processor that can collect the data from the sensor arrays and perform machine learning on them and they can be made such that they are in single chip low power and they're it is the property that we use as i mentioned is di electrophoresis so what we the what we have to do to get these nanomaterials to assemble at a given location is to apply and nonuniform soviet shown a large scale assembly of almost fifty different sites on on a given chip and the next slide basically shows you electronic on sept that was solution deposited at four different this is one of the first demonstrations of having an integrated single chip electronic nose using nanomaterials done outside the clean we didn't just try those four nanomaterials we have expanded considerably beyond those nanomaterials as i mentioned the way we get electronic noise capability is the diversity of sensing elements to get the diversity v have positive and negative responses to these different gases and the way we can identify a certain gas is by they could deny zinc the degree to which each of these individual sensing elements of a spark so this is an on s response that provides you with a very unique signature to a particular target gas so the outlook for for this application as i mentioned is in water mental monitoring this is showing you an actual  a particular gas and it's concentration so you feed in some kind of a classification engine or the machine learning sort of engine to perform the recognition the same electronic nose can also be used for morning health so you single battery that's basically something that that we've been working on just to give you an alternate realization of the same electronic noise platform is this very new research effort in my group called paper knows this is essentially an entire electronic nourse platform realized on paper not an expensive substrate the regular paper that you use in day to day life so th that requires is a printer where you can basically pattern conduct and insulating inks on on paper and functionalize ing these nanomaterial using it in can process the way we  detection of almost all the organic compounds that we find in the in in in a petroleum kind of an environment where we can basically detect elevated levels of  the one way of solving the problem with chronic wounds is to be able to into re at the right time when the winds are not healing and so to be able to do that we should have means to make sense as in devices that can sense when the wind is not healing and deliver drugs on demand so to me that we came up with this idea of smart threads where these threads are essentially the same text threads but made route the information to a chemical and physical sensor that's also made using threads and also an electronics platform that's connected on the surface of the wound to route the information from these sensors to for example the smartphone so what we have here is a platform where smart sensing threats can monitor chemical and physical biomarkers of wound healing says that they can mortar ph fortune magazine also talked about how they can help patients there's a there's a lot of problem in where or surgical the surgical site gets infected so this can also help not just the diabetic wounds but temperature you can basically form a very intelligent system with all these smart sensing treads on a bandage or in the suture for for many of these biomedical applications so these are just some of the threats that we made we had as i just mentioned the strain sensing threats can be objectively used to monitor wound healing and this is an experiment where we had different size rooms and the threads were able to communicate wireles control the amount of drugs you delhi were at a given at a given site so you can cycle through the temperature so you can control the exact dosage you can also control exactly very deadly worse by basically routing the current into growth factor this is a drug that promotes when dealing and this shows that the active delivery of drugs using these threads can actually heal wounds faster so just to conclude we're in the thread for diagnostics and therapy and in all of these up locations i basically showed that we can work with low cost processing most of the techniques we used are low cost processing does not require expensive clean rooms we work with  between biomedical engineers doctors clinicians and a lot of collaborators here at in the boston area and also around and around the country so you know some of the sponsors of the that is such activities and think