Kristofer S.J. Pister (Advisor)

Stroke is a leading cause of disability in the United States. Recovery from stroke is complex and ultimately limited by the brains limited ability to regenerate damaged tissue. Ideally, we would want to drive neurogenesis and angiogenesis in a stroke lesion to aid in recovery. We propose a multimodality platform for stimulating neurogenesis which simultaneously allows for electrophysiological recording of neurons in the lesion area after stroke. Our aim is to provide a paradigm for making complex substrates for nervous tissue. With various devices integrated, multiple functions can be...

We propose a new multimaterial 3D printing technique with projected sub-micron resolution. Inorganic nanoparticles (≈1-10nm) of common microfabrication materials are electrically charged, manipulated electromagnetically in vacuum with an ion trap, and shot toward a substrate where they deposit onto a part under construction, similar to PVD methods. To date, we have demonstrated some basic material deposition and are beginning implementation of high-resolution printing. Eventually, this ion printing technology could allow rapid prototyping of integrated circuits and MEMS....

Glial passivation and subsequent electrical insulation of implantable microelectrodes is a major bottleneck for long-term viability of neural probes. Self-deploying microelectrodes have been developed to minimize glial scarring and adverse biological effects near neural recording sites, but typically suffer from low electrode densities and deployment distance.

In this dissertation, we propose and evaluate a large displacement, self-deploying architecture using a water absorbing hydrogel to extrude a high density carbon fiber array out of a microfabricated shuttle. To enable mm-scale...