The research in Dr. Rehman's lab focuses on the development and integration of multimodal sensing and biosensing platforms both in terms of the transduction mechanism (e.g., piezoelectric, electrochemical, optical, and impedance transducers) as well as the sensing materials and interfaces (e.g., ionic liquids, metallic and metal oxide films in composites) with the aim to achieve higher reliability in sensing for critical real world scenarios. Such integration has significant figures of merits such as sensitivity, selectivity, and portability. Particularly, the areas of application include the biological cells based analytical systems (e.g., anitbody-antigen interactions for viral detection, the cell-cell interactions, carbohydrate-protein interactions for diagnostics and therapeutics of various diseases such as cancers and bacterial infections) and also the stand-off detection of explosives and other explosive/hazardous gases (e.g., TATP, TNT, Methane, VOCs etc.). All these areas of interest and many others in the field of sensing have the potential of enhancing the quality of life, and in many cases, of saving the human lives.

Futhermore, the lab is also involved in electrochemical applications of the catalytic films (e.g., metals, metal alloys, oxides, sulfides and phosphides of transition metals) with exotic surface characters to be applied in water splitting based energy storage, biowaste conversion into fine chemicals, fuel cells, and supercapacitors. For this purpose, chemical vapor deposition as well as nanomaterial based printable solid state electrolytes are investigated. Moreover, the nanomaterial mimics of the the biological enzymes are designed and explored in their applications in optoelectrochemical sensors and catalytic applications.

A recent project in this group is the development of paper based low cost sensors for the identification of coronavirus, for which the electrochemical principles will be employed on nanodimensional 3-D printed electrodes will be fabricated.