ME Students Receive Awards
01/05/2009
Dr. Andrew Birnbaum Received ICALEO Award
Dr. Andrew J. Birnbaum, a recent graduate of the Mechanical Engineering
PhD program, received a 3rd place award for his presentation,
"Pre-heated Substrate Effects on Melt-mediated Laser Crystallization on
NiTi Thin Films " at the 2008 International Congress on Applications of
Lasers & Electro-Optics (ICALEO). The paper is co-authered with his
thesis advisor, Prof. Larry Yao, as well as Prof. James Im of Materials
Sciences, and Prof. Ainissa Rameriz of Yale University. Andrew's work
investigates the effects of solidification rate on NiTi thin films
subjected to a pulsed, melt-mediated laser crystallization technique. A
high degree of control over the microstructure as well as the
constitutive response of laser irradiated films is demonstrated. Andrew
explained, "Due to a solid state diffusionless phase transformation,
shape memory alloys (SMA's) exhibit highly non-traditional constitutive
responses which effectively enable these materials to "remember" a
desired geometry. Upon having been inelastically deformed, this
memorized shape can be fully recovered by heating the material above a
critical threshold temperature. Since this phenomena stems from atomic
scale shifting, the ability to alter the material at the
microstructural level is very attractive for micro-scale device
realization." The ICALEO is devoted to the field of laser materials
processing and is viewed as the premier source of technical information
in the field. For more information on ICALEO please visit http://www.icaleo.org/.
Xian Huang, ME Ph.D. student received IEEE Best Paper Award
Xian Huang, a Mechanical Engineering Ph.D. student who is
advised by Professor Qiao Lin and conducts research in the Columbia Biofluidic
Microsystems Lab, received the Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE International
Conference on Nano/Micro Engineered and Molecular Systems (NEMS ’09, http://www.ieee-nems.org/) that took place
in Shenzhen, China on January 5-8, 2009.
Xian's paper is titled "A biocompatible affinity MEMS sensor for continuous monitoring of glucose." The paper presents a MEMS device that can be potentially implanted in subcutaneous tissue to allow minimally invasive, continuous monitoring of glucose for diabetes management. The device accomplishes glucose detection via viscosity changes of a biocompatible polymer, poly(acrylamide-ran-3-acrylamidophenylboronic acid) (PAA-ran-PAAPBA), when it binds reversibly to glucose. The viscosity changes are determined by measuring the hydrodynamic damping of the polymer solution on the vibration of a magnetically actuated microcantilever or diaphragm. Experimental results have demonstrated that the device is capable of accurately detecting glucose at physiologically relevant concentrations.
The coauthors of Xian’s paper include Siqi Li and Professor Qian Wang (University of South Carolina), Professor Jerome Schultz (UC Riverside), and Professor Qiao Lin. The paper was selected as the Best Student Paper from 8 Finalists, which were chosen from 253 papers presented at the conference by researchers from 30 countries.