Michel M. Maharbiz (Advisor)

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...

Autonomous swimming microrobots for biomedical applications and distributed sensing require locally controllable swimming mechanisms. This project aims to develop underwater, rotary electrostatic inchworm motors for artificial flagella. Our proposed design uses gap closing actuators with an angle arm design, similar to existing inchworm motors, to drive a central rotor, all fabricated with an SOI process. An artificial flagella is attached the rotor, converting the rotational motion into propulsion. Major challenges include efficient operation of electrostatic motors underwater and...

This dissertation presents a millimeter-scale CMOS 64x64 single charged particle radiation detector system for cancer radiotherapy; this work is applicable to therapies including external beam radiotherapy (EBRT), targeted radionuclide therapy (TRT), and brachytherapy. We demonstrate 1 um x 1 um diode pixels capable of measuring energy deposition into a depletion region by single charged particles. These pixels can be arrayed to provide large detection areas; we demonstrate a 512 um x 512 um array. Instead of sensing the voltage drop caused by radiation, the system measures pulse...