Ming C. Wu (Advisor)

Ideal point-of-care medical diagnostic devices are low cost assays capable of performing quantitative on-site rapid testing with high sensitivity and minimal manual steps.

Current mainstream assays have several key limitations. Take, for instance, the common lateral flow assay—e.g. the pregnancy dipstick test. Such assays produce rapid results at low cost; however, they are mostly qualitative tests yielding only positive/negative results rather than quantitative figures. Other standard immunosorbant assays such as ELISA yield quantitative results but require...

Optical microresonators are key enabling elements for many photonic integrated circuits (PICs) areas. Their applications include modulators, optical filters, optical delay lines, nonlinear optical devices, and optical sensors. In previous demonstrations, the coupling of the resonator and its input/output is generally fixed, or tuned using non- integrated alignment system. The ability to control and vary the optical coupling is highly desirable in the areas of emerging adaptive optical circuits as well as in ultra-compact tunable, switchable, and reconfigurable optical components and...

There is a growing need for technology that can control microscale oxygen gradients onto a tissue or culture sample in vitro. This dissertation introduces the oxygen microgradient chip (OMA), which employs electrolysis to generate oxygen microgradients within cell culture without forming bubbles. Dissolved oxygen generated at noble microelectrodes patterned on a chip surface diffuses through a gas-permeable silicone membrane and is dosed into cell culture. The amount of generated oxygen is directly proportional to a current flowing across the electrodes and thus can be controlled...