Since August 2011, PhD student, Yale University, School of Engineering & Applied Science, Department of Chemical Engineering

May 2010, B.S. in Chemical Engineering, University of Missouri , Department of Chemical Engineering

My research is focused on designing a microfluidic device to separate particles based on deformability.  This device might be used to enable rapid, low-cost assays of cell health in diseases such as Malaria which alter the rigidity of infected cells.

Our first step towards this goal is fabricating particles with different rigidity. We do that by fabricating microcapsules with fluid core. The microcapsules are generated by polyelectrolyte complexation of various cationic/anionic polymer pairs. We have successfully fabricated Sodium Alginate/Poly(4-vinylpyridine) microcapsules by electrospray (Fig 1).

We plan to test the rigidity of the microcapsules by observing the pressure vs deformation behavior of the microcapsules in a microfluidic device with different widths (Fig 2).

Figure 1: Microcapsules formed by spraying 1 wt% Sodium Alginate into 1 wt% Poly(4-vinylpyridine).

Figure 2: Design for microfluidic device with width ranging from 30 µm to 70 µm

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