Electrolysis and Microgradient Technology for Cell Culture

ABSTRACT:
The oxygen microenvironment within tissue plays a crucial role in many biological processes and the treatment of many diseases. No technology currently exists that allows the researcher to control localized oxygen doses and impose arbitrary oxygen gradients within tissue with microscale resolution. In this talk I will discuss a new technology that uses microscale electrolysis to generate precise doses of dissolved oxygen. We believe this technique will enable a new class of biodevices capable of imposing 1D and 2D oxygen microgradients on tissue.

BIO:
Michel M. Maharbiz received his B.S. degree from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY in 1997. He joined Prof. Roger T. Howe's group in the EECS Dept. at the University of California at Berkeley in 1997 and Prof. Jay D. Keasling's lab in ChemE in 1999. He was an Intel Masters Fellow from 1997 to 2000. He received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in May 2003. His research interests include parallel assembly processes, microsystems for cell culture and biology, and bio-derived processing and fabrication. Dr. Maharbiz is a member of the IEEE and the ACS.