Research
Electrochemistry is a powerful analytical tool for detecting important analytes (e.g., proteins, nucleic acids, metabolites, metal ions) for personal and public health. However, commercial benchtop electrochemical stations are typically bulky, complex, and expensive, making them unsuitable for point-of-care (POC) applications. The ideal features for the handheld electrochemical potentiostat for POC applications include small size, low power consumption, high precision measurements, low cost fabrication and maintenance. Taking into account these considerations, we aim to design a miniaturized, an inexpensive (<$100), and easy to use electrochemical potentiostat to meet the demand for on-site measurement. Subsequently, we will design interface with smart phones. The mobile device will act as a control-console, data storage system, communication unit, and graphical plotter for the electroanalysis.
My current research is focus on biomedical technology. The goal is to develop new technological platforms for early detection of major human diseases such as cancer. Ongoing project is to develop a paper-based electrochemical sensor using nanomaterials modified glossy paper for quantitative detection of cytokines in serum samples for biomarker validation and clinical research. To do so, I employ glossy paper as substrate due to its simplicity, low cost, portability, and compatibility for biochemical sensing. The project challenge the existing approach (inkjet printing technology) to fabricate conductive paper-based sensor on filter paper.
I’m also interested to develop new teaching strategies to improve student learning. Ongoing project is developing active learning and student-centered pedagogies in Biomedical Engineering introductory electronics course. The project involves students-as-partner to co-create teaching and learning resources. The students’ feedbacks, which include the knowledge and skill sets necessary to program a variety of electronics components, will be collected. Finding such as students’ role, experiences, working relationship with academic staff, and the resources that students produced are analyzed to gain a deeper understanding of the benefits and challenges by involving student-as-partner in the planning and design the course. It is expected that learning, playing, and experimenting would introduce students in an interesting way to the breath of engineering, motivate them in their engineering studies.
In today’s trend of lifelong learning, informal learning is extremely important modern adult learning methods. It happens outside the formal education system or structured training. We hypothesise that an effective mentoring program will stimulate students to think in new and creative ways. For the mentor, the benefit of helping students realize his or her professional goals and aspiration are lifelong, too.
In this project, we will start a mentoring program, where students will have a chance to learn together and have one-to-one support from the mentors with whom they are paired. Subsequently, we will evaluate the effectiveness of this mentor-mentee approached through (i) indirect measures including frequency and duration of the engagement, (ii) direct measures including validated surveys from both mentors and mentees to give their honest feedback and discuss their concerns. This feedback can provide success stories to share across the school. This project will also provide pilot data for the design of follow-up studies to answer pedagogical questions surrounding the value of informal learning in Makerspace for the training of students.
If you are interested to be a mentee, please visit https://sites.google.com/view/scbe-makers/mentoring-programme to know more.