College of Engineering News
Assistant Professor Tingrui Pan, Department of Biomedical Engineering
Pan Receives CAREER Award for Printable Lab-on-a-Chip Research
Posted on: October 7, 2009
Tingrui Pan, assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award—$400,000 over five years—for his project titled “Lab-on-a-Chip Systems of Photopatternable Multifunctional Nanocomposite Materials for Cell Detection and Manipulation.”
NSF CAREER Awards recognize and support promising junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholar through excellent education, outstanding research and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. The funds help to support graduate students in the recipient’s research laboratory.
Pan’s research uses micro-nanotechnology to create cell-analysis tools with an inexpensive customized Xerox office printer. Unique nano-composite materials will be used to produce a lab-on-a-chip platform that can analyze specific cells in a complicated biological environment. “It is a kind of diagnosis chip,” Pan said. “Put a drop of biological sample on the chip and it will be automatically split into a large number of highly organized tiny droplets for individual analysis.” The chip can be designed to sort and study various immune cells, for example. “Cells that may look the same, but function very differently,” Pan explained. “We need a tool that can distinguish among such cells so that we can understand what they are doing, diagnose disease earlier and design better therapeutic strategies.”
Moreover, the bioengineered chips can be inexpensively printed and customized to the analytical task at hand. “Eventually, we want a PDA-type system in which you can insert this chip as a cartridge and diagnosis in a plug-and-play fashion, saving time and resources,” Pan said. He and his group will collaborate with other UC Davis Biomedical Engineering faculty doing cell biology research. “It’s important that engineers understand biologists’ needs and that biologists are aware of the most advanced technology,” Pan added.
An important aspect of the NSF CAREER Award is education. Supported by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the award not only funds graduate students in Pan’s research group, but also will make possible dedicated educational workshops for science teachers, preparing them to teach about nano-bioengineering technologies in K – 12 classrooms.
“We want to help kids see what the technology of the future will be and have direct hands-on experience with it,” Pan said. “You’ve heard the saying – one picture is worth a thousand words. We think participating in one experiment could do more than anything in a textbook to encourage students to get involved in science and technology.”
This aspect of Pan’s project is a collaboration with the International Baccalaureate program. Workshops will be held at Sacramento State University, with content furnished online for science teachers everywhere. An international outreach initiative with Asian and European universities includes an annual research symposium and summer collaborative projects.
Pan received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and master’s degrees in both electrical engineering and biomedical engineering from the University of Minnesota. He received his bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University in Beijing.