|
Dr. Yu-Chong Tai
Professor of Electrical
Engineering, California Institute of Technology
Biography
Dr. Yu-Chong Tai is a Professor of Electrical, mechanical and Bioengineering
Engineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). His main
research interest has been MEMS since graduate school. He graduated from UC
Berkeley working on polysilicon MEMS and he developed the first
electrically-spun micromotors. He joined Caltech after Berkeley and he built
the Caltech MEMS Lab, which is a 100% MEMS facility with 7,000 square feet of
laboratory (including 3,000 square feet of class-100 clean room). He leads a
group of more than 20 researchers working on various MEMS projects such as
integrated microfluidics, bio MEMS, smart skins, lab-on-a-chip and, recently,
biomedical MEMS. He has more than 300 technical articles in the field of MEMS.
He is the recipient of the IBM Fellows, Ross Tucker Award, Best Thesis Award,
Presidential Young Investigator (PYI) Award and Packard Award. Hwas the General
co-Chairman of the 2002 IEEE MEMS Conference. He is an IEEE Fellow.
Keynote Talk
Parylene MEMS for
Biomedical Applications
Parylene is an emerging polymer MEMS material. Parylene is normally prepared by a room-temperature CVD process. It has the unique features of being biocompatible, chemically inert and optically transparent. It is also a post-CMOS compatible material. It has mainly been used as a protective coating such as in pacemakers and stents. Interestingly, however, parylene can be a superb MEMS material. Over the last few years, MEMS technologies incorporating parylene have been developed so various 3D parylene MEMS structures are now available. Our goal is to develop integrated systems with complex functions based on this new material. This talk will discuss our works specifically on biomedical applications. Topics of discussion include parylene microfluidics, HPLC-on-a-chip, intraocular pressure sensors, retinal/cortical/spinal implants, and circulating tumor cell (CTC) separation from whole blood.