USTAR Professor of ECE & Bio-engineering, University of Utah
Host: Roger Howe
Abstract
For over 5 decades well-established materials and fabrication technologies of integrated circuits and micro-electromechanical systems have provided us with rich assortments of methodologies to envision, design, and fabricate a variety of sensors and actuators along with their interface electronics and processors. As we move forward to address “more difficult” sensing issues and also to address quiescent power consumption of scaled electronics, new “functional” materials as well as new approaches and methodologies have started evolving, perhaps, faster than before. In this presentation, I will discuss my group’s efforts in developing new sensors (multi- ferroics, optical, and Mott transition based) with the potential to detect less than 10 fT magnetic fields (currently our sensor’s minimum detectable signal is 27 pT) for brain imaging in unconstrained human beings to map and correlate brain activities with behavior. Compared to other magnetometers (SQUIDs and atomic vapor), these sensors are low power (<10 μW/sensor) and are much smaller and easier to be assembled into arrays of sensors that can cover the skull to access different centers and regions of the human brain.
