Research

Liquid Crystal Droplet-based Sensors for Detecting and Reporting Aqueous Analytes

One major research area within our group is the design of liquid crystal (LC) droplet-based chemical and biological sensors with tunable sensitivity and selectivity. We recently showed that colloidal stabilization approaches based on the use of surface-modified nanoparticles that adsorb to the LC droplet interface to prevent coalescence lead to substantially improved shelf-life of LC emulsions (i.e., at least three months up to one year after preparation), providing a promising platform for developing sensors with long-term shelf-life stability, as well as opportunities to tune the sensitivity and selectivity of response to target chemical and biological analytes.