Joint MSE/BME Seminar

March 23, 2023

1:00 p.m. ET

Scott Hall 5201

Organic Electronics for Disease Diagnostics

Organic electronic materials provide a unique toolbox for establishing electrical communication with biological systems. In this talk, I will show how these materials are used at the interface with biological systems to detect biochemical molecules. I will introduce two types of organic electronic sensors; one that detects Alzheimer’s disease-associated proteins with performance exceeding that of the state-of-the-art,^1,2 and the other that detects coronavirus spike proteins at the physical limit.³ Having challenged these sensors with patient samples, I will discuss areas where proof-of-concept biosensor platforms may fail. By tackling these problems, we improve device performance to a level that marks a considerable step toward biochemical sensing of infectious and noninfectious disease biomarkers.

1 S. Wustoni et al. Biosens. Bioelectron. 2019, 143, 111561.
2 A. Koklu et al. ACS Nano 2021,15, 8130.
3 K. Guo et al. Nat. Biomed. Eng. 2021, 5, 666.

Sahika Inal, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

Sahika Inal is an Associate Professor of Bioengineering with co-affiliations in Electrical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering programs at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). She has a B.Sc. degree in Textile Engineering from Istanbul Technical University (Turkey, 2007), an M.Sc. in Polymer Science, and a Ph.D. in Experimental Physics, both from the University of Potsdam, supervised by Prof. Dieter Neher (Germany, 2013). She completed her postdoctoral training with Prof. George Malliaras at the Center of Microelectronics of Provence of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Saint-Étienne (France, 2016). Her expertise is in polymer science and bioelectronic devices, particularly in the photophysics of conjugated polymers, characterization of polymer films, and the design of biosensors and actuators. Since 2016, Inal lab at KAUST exploits the functionalities of organic electronic materials, investigates ionic/electronic charge transport, and designs electronic devices that record/stimulate biological signals. Sahika is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and has received recognitions, including ACS PMSE Young Investigator Award 2022, Beilby Medal and Prize 2022, and Journal of Materials Chemistry Lectureship (2022). She is the author of 105+ publications, and her work has been cited more than 8900 times.