GRASP Seminar Series: Fall 2007

October 12, 11:00 a.m., Wu & Chen Auditorium, Levine Hall (3330 Walnut Street)

Karl Bohringer
University of Washington

"Programmable Self-Assembly at the Micro- and Nano-scale"

Abstract: Massively parallel self-assembling systems present a promising
alternative to conventional manufacturing. Recently, various
successful instances of self-assembly have been demonstrated,
including applications for commercial products such as RFID tags.
However, the full impact of this approach will only be realized once
these systems can be programmed or reconfigured on demand (i.e.,
attachment between components is activated by software).

In this talk, we review several projects that lead towards such
self-assembling systems. A key concept to achieve this goal is the
"programmable surface", an engineered interface whose characteristics
(surface forces, hydrophobicity, friction, etc.) can be controlled
with high spatial and temporal resolution. We present sample projects
that address various aspects ranging from real-time control of surface
properties, to binding site designs that optimize attractive forces
between components, to computational and algorithmic issues in the
modeling of self-assembling systems.

Biography: Karl Böhringer is Professor of Electrical Engineering with adjunct
appointments in Computer Science & Engineering and in Mechanical
Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle. He received
both his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Cornell
University and his Diplom-Informatiker degree from the University of
Karlsruhe, Germany. He was a visiting scholar at the Stanford Robotics
Lab and Transducer Lab and a postdoctoral researcher at the University
of California, Berkeley. He has held visiting faculty positions at the
universities of Kyoto, Tokyo, Tohoku (Japan), and Sao Paolo (Brazil).

His current interests include micromanipulation and microassembly, as
well as biomedical implants and bioMEMS for single-cell genomics and
proteomics. His Ph.D. thesis was nominated for the ACM doctoral
dissertation award. He received an NSF postdoctoral associateship in
1997, an NSF CAREER award in 1999, and was an NSF New Century Scholar
in 2000. His work was featured among the Top 100 Science Stories in
Discover Magazine's 2002 "Year in Science". In 2004, he received the
IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Academic Early Career Award and a
sabbatical fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of
Science (JSPS).


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