ECE Calendar

Abstract:
Innovation of health care technologies is the key to improve health care quality and affordability. The personalized molecular diagnostics and therapeutics enabled precise identifications of molecular causes of diseases and most effective treatments for each individual patient. By incorporating engineered nanophotonic devices with biomolecular probes such as oligonucleotides and peptides, various nanobionic systems are created for molecular diagnostic and therapeutic applications. In this talk, I am going to introduce a few nanobionic devices in the aspects of design, fabrication and characterization from both viewpoints of ECE and biology. Particularly reviewed is the molecular diagnosis of cancer at epigenetic and proteomic level as well as the cancer biomarker targeted chemo- and gene therapeutics by using these nanobionic devices. The device applications in system biology and translational medicine for BioPharma industry will also be discussed.

Biography:
Prof. Logan Liu joined University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2008 as an assistant professor in Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory. Prof. Liu has a multidisciplinary educational background and was trained in both engineering technology development and clinical medical research environments. He obtained his joint Ph.D. degree in Bioengineering from University of California-Berkeley and University of California-San Francisco with the honor of outstanding publication award. His graduate research was focusing on developing micro and nanophotonic and electronic molecular detection systems for cancer diagnosis and therapy. He had his postdoctoral training in Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at San Francisco where he worked with breast and prostate oncologists and clinical medical workers to apply novel nanotechnologies in diagnosing and curing cancers. Afterwards he joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a prestigious Lawrence Fellow to foster the nanobiotechnology research there for biodefense applications. His expertise includes design, modeling, and fabrication of nanoelectronic and nanophotonic devices and their biomedical applications. His current research interest is developing “Nanobionics” by integrating solid-state optoelectronic nanodevices with functional biomolecules and studying the properties of electrons, photons and ions in the hybrid system.