Roya Maboudian (Advisor)

Research Advised by Professor Roya Maboudian

BPN973: Low-Carbon Piezoresistive Cement Paste for Structural Health Monitoring

Stuart McElhany
2023

Global usage of concrete has tripled in the last 40 years,[1] and continues to grow rapidly, placing immense pressure on the environment while requiring its use for safe and effective infrastructure. Concrete accounts for roughly 10% of worldwide CO2 emissions annually. A promising method for directly reducing the CO2 emissions associated with concrete is through replacement of cement, the primary binding material in concrete, with a percentage of carbon, creating so called carbon-incorporated cement composites (CCC). Carbon may be sourced from the waste product of methane...

Liam McDonough

Undergraduate Researcher
Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Professor Roya Maboudian (Advisor)
B.S. 2025 (Anticipated)

Sai Munagavalasa

Undergraduate Researcher
Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Professor Roya Maboudian (Advisor)
B.S. 2024 (Anticipated)

Pat Taedullayasatit

Undergraduate Researcher
Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Professor Roya Maboudian (Advisor)
B.S. 2024 (Anticipated)

BPN995: Growth of Metal Organic Framework (MOF) Crystals under Microgravity and their Prospects for Chemical Sensing (New Project)

Liam McDonough
Pat Taedullayasatit
Sai Munagavalasa
Yaprak Ozbakir
2023

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are porous, high surface area materials that consist of metal-cluster nodes connected by organic linkers to form highly ordered structures with various pore geometries and chemical properties. Due to their unique and tunable structure, MOFs have shown substantial promise in a broad range of applications, including chemical sensing, gas adsorption and separation, and catalysis. To investigate the intrinsic properties of MOFs for their sensing performance, single crystals are ideal platforms that mitigate the impact of defects, impurities, and grain...

BPN977: Metal-Loaded Metal Oxide Nanocomposites for Electronic Gas Sensors

Tzu-Chiao Wei
Yaprak Ozbakir
Veronica Arriaga
Sterling Cavanaugh
Carlo Carraro
2023

Semiconducting metal oxides (MOX) such as SnO2 are an industry-standard material for chemiresistive sensing. However, many MOX-based gas sensors suffer from poor sensitivity, limited selectivity—particularly in the presence of water vapor—and insufficient stability. To address these shortcomings, catalytically active noble metals, such as Pd, are loaded onto the MOX materials to form noble metal-loaded MOX nanocomposites. In this work, we focus on Pd-loaded SnO2 (Pd/SnO2) due to their promising sensitivity to and selectivity for CO and CH4. Pd/SnO2 nanocomposites with varying Pd/Sn...

BPN994: Atomically Dispersed Supported Metal Catalysts for Robust Chemiresistive Gas Sensors

Yaprak Ozbakir
2023

Long-term stability of chemiresistive gas sensors is essential for their use in industrial and residential safety and air-quality monitoring systems. Incorporation of noble metals into the gas sensors has been proved to be an effective strategy to enhance their sensitivity and selectivity. However, noble metal particles are prone to poisoning, resulting in catalyst deactivation. Atomically dispersed supported metal catalysts constitute a new class of materials that contains isolated individual atoms or synergistically coupled few-atom ensembles dispersed on, and/or coordinated with...

BPN978: Hot Car Studies

Anthony Hon
2023

Young children trapped in a car without adult supervision may suffer life-threatening complications such as hyperthermia and heat stroke from extreme temperatures—which may rise to 130 °F in some cases. Our research aims to ascertain child presence within two to three minutes of unsupervised activity by probing increases in the levels of carbon dioxide emitted during human exhalation. Non-dispersive infrared (NDIR) sensors are employed to measure car carbon dioxide concentrations every two seconds. Specific numerical metrics are then derived from the data, and the presence of a child can...

Yaprak Ozbakir

Postdoctoral Scholar
Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Professor Roya Maboudian (Advisor)

BSAC Spring 2023 Research Review Presenter

Anthony Hon

Undergraduate Researcher
Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Professor Roya Maboudian (Advisor)
Professor Carlo Carraro (Advisor)
B.S. 2024 (Anticipated)

Anthony is currently a fourth-year undergraduate student in Professor Roya Maboudian's lab at the Unversity of California, Berkeley. He is pursuing a major in Chemical Engineering and a minor in Data Science, and is expected to graduate in Spring 2024.