MEMS Seminar: "DNA Origami: The Bridge to the Bottom"

Conventional top-down nanofabrication, over the last six decades, has enabled almost all the complex electronic, optical and micro-fluidic devices that form the foundation of our society. Parallel efforts, exploring bottom-up self-assembly processes, have also enabled design and synthesis of structures like quantum dots, carbon nanotubes and unique bio-molecules that possess technologically relevant proper- ties unachievable top-down. While both these approaches have independently matured, ongoing efforts to create "hybrid nanostructures" combining both strategies, has been fraught with technical challenges. The main roadblock is the absence of a scalable method to deterministically organize components built bottom-up within top-down nanofabricated structures.

Ashwin Gopinath joined MIT in Jan 2019 as an assistant professor in the Mechanical engineering department where his lab is working on projects at the intersection of molecular self-assembly, surface- chemistry, top-down nanofabrication and synthetic biology. Dr. Gopinath got his Phd in electrical engineering from Boston University, in 2010, for his work on understanding light transport in disordered media. Subsequently, he was a senior research scientist at Caltech and then at Google [X].

Lunch will be served at 11:30 am.
Hosted by Dr. Gaurav Arya