John Rogers’ Post

More pics from the iCANX Association event – opening ceremony, involving representatives from six different continents, and dinner gathering at the end of the first day. Too many people shown here to mention everyone, but here’s a subset: Metin Sitti, Yury Gogotsi, Anne Andrews, Paul Weiss, Ali Khademhosseini, Chennupati Jagadish, Haixia(Alice) Zhang, Francesco Stellacci, Tony Jun Huang, Huiliang (Evan) Wang, etc, along with several former postdocs, now in faculty positions: Wubin Bai (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Xinge Yu (City University of Hong Kong), Lizhi Xu (The University of Hong Kong), Xian Huang (Tianjin University), Young Min Song (Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology), Mengdi Han (Peking University).

Great first day of talks and panel discussions at the iCANX Association event! My presentation, titled ‘From Scientific Discovery, to Engineering Development and Commercial Deployment,’ reviewed three short stories of examples of my involvement in these activities, spanning tools for semiconductor metrology, to components for wavelength division multiplexed communication systems, to advanced clinical-grade wearable technologies. I then joined a panel to discuss lessons learned. If you’re interested, the slides for my talk – quite a bit different than a usual conference presentation – are at the link below. Thanks again to Prof. Haixia(Alice) Zhang (Peking University) and Prof. Paul Weiss (UCLA), co-founders of iCANX, for the invitation to participate! https://lnkd.in/dueKrE6B

Into the way-back machine! Super fun dinner with Dr. John R. Rogers (my dad!) and Dr. Jack Wiener, reminiscing about our work together back in 1991 – development of neural networks for determining rock permeability from wireline log data, the first use of neural networks in the broader area of applied geosciences. A patent on this concept, filed in 1992, was awarded in 1993, more than 30 years ago! – the first of a large collection of similar patents for related applications. The networks that we used back then were often much, much smaller (just a few dozen nodes!) than those of today, but the core concepts in architecture and backpropagation are largely the same! In retrospect, I probably should have focused a lot more energy on extending these methods to my own independent research efforts – who knows, perhaps I could have become a trail-blazer in the use of neural nets in materials science and biomedical engineering! https://lnkd.in/gq8FacXs

Looking forward to the iCANX Association event in Davos on July 11th and 12th, but a few hours before boarding my flight, I’ll be delivering a plenary lecture at a very interesting conference organized around the topic of ‘Living Machines’. My presentation, titled “Bioelectronics for Living Machines,” will feature some published and unpublished collaborative work with Prof. Rashid Bashir, Prof. Taher Saif, Prof. Mattia Gazzola and others at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, with Prof. Yonggang Huang at Northwestern University and with a collection of now-former postdocs, including Prof. Hangbo Zhao (University of Southern California), Prof. Abraham Vázquez-Guardado (North Carolina State University), Prof. Haiwen Luan (UC San Diego), Prof. Xinchen Ni (The University of Texas at Dallas), Prof. Yiyuan Yang (National University of Singapore), Prof. Zhengwei Li (University of Houston), Prof. Changsheng Wu (National University of Singapore), Prof. Wubin Bai (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Prof. Enming SONG (Fudan University), Prof. Quansan Yang (University of Washington), Prof. Mengdi Han (Peking University) and Prof. Yihui Zhang (Tsinghua University). Links to the website for the conference and to a couple of our papers on living and small-scale robots are below. Thanks to Prof. Matthew Tresch and the other organizers for the invitation to speak at this event! https://lnkd.in/gYiCSvqJ https://lnkd.in/g7A-yjrU

Very excited to announce -- after nearly 5 years of collaborative research and continuous financial support from The National Institutes of Health – our successful development and testing of a compact, implantable system capable of preventing death due to opioid overdose. The original vision was described in a joint proposal with researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, as outlined in a press release in October 2019 that coincided with the NIH funding announcement (link below). The complete manuscript that summarizes our work, titled “An Autonomous Implantable Device for the Prevention of Death from Opioid Overdose,” was posted to BioRxiv today, link below, and was also submitted to a top journal. Next step – translation to a platform with regulatory approval, available for use by anyone in need. Thanks so much to NIH for their support and to our many collaborators and co-authors, including Prof. Robert Gereau, Prof. Mike Montana, Prof. Michael Talcott, Prof. Yonggang Huang, Prof. Jose Moron-Concepcion, Prof. Mitchell Pet and others – but most importantly to the key students and postdocs (current and former) who actually did the work and made it all happen: Joanna L. Ciatti, Prof. Abraham Vázquez-Guardado (now on the faculty at NCSU), Dr. Jihun Park, Dr. Vicki Brings and many others. https://lnkd.in/gfWQ2-_A https://lnkd.in/gPSbprBy

With this post, I’m extending a big thank you to Dr. Lilian Celeste Alarcon Segovia, a visiting scientist from Paraguay who did her PhD work in Argentina, for her many contributions to our research. Lilian first spent a year with us starting in 2018, then returned to Paraguay and Argentina, before coming back to our group nearly two years ago. Her interests are in medical technologies that can improve the health of people in lower and middle income countries, specifically women’s health – very well aligned with our work on cost-effective wireless vital signs monitoring devices for maternal, fetal and neonatal patients. We currently have scaled deployments of such devices in Zambia, Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, Mexico, Brazil, Pakistan and India, through partnerships with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Steele Foundation for Hope, the Wellcome Leap Foundation and the Save the Children International organization. Our startup company Sibel Health serves as the main vehicle for engaging in these activities -- a recent example is a ~$20M program with the Gates Foundation, described at the link below. Lilian’s latest project focuses on currently unused plant residues from local agriculture, as an ultralow cost base material for ionically conductive electrodes for recording ECG, EEG and EMG. The experiments are now done, and the results are being incorporated into a manuscript to be submitted to a peer reviewed journal sometime in the next two months. Best of luck to Lilian - we look forward to opportunities to continue to collaborate with her in the future! https://lnkd.in/g9P9GMsK

Very happy to announce that Dr. Hee Sup Shin, a postdoctoral fellow currently in the group, will transition this week to a faculty position at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC). Hee Sup came to us after finishing his MS and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University under the guidance of Prof. Sarah Bergbreiter. His evolution and growth during his time in the group has been remarkable – to the point now that he comfortably engages in a completely independent manner on the development of various innovative biomedical devices with our collaborators in surgery at Washington University in St. Louis (Prof. Mitchell Pet) and in dermatology (Prof. Amy Paller and Dr. Steve Xu) here at Northwestern University. He has mastered all aspects of his projects – from materials science and mechanical engineering to wireless circuit design – with an ability to fabricate production-quality prototypes, some of which almost look like commercial devices!!, for safe and reliable testing on human subjects. Specific examples include hardware/software systems that provide accurate, real-time measurements of angular motions of joints of the fingers after a surgery as well as those that enable precise quantification of the real and imaginary parts of the modulus of the skin – both in the form of manuscripts that we will submit for publication in the next month or two. I’m sure that Hee Sup will establish an exciting set of research programs as he builds his group at UMKC! Best of luck with everything!!

Congratulations to Dr. Ziying Hu – currently a postdoctoral fellow in the group -- on accepting a staff position at Lam Research, a top semiconductor equipment company with headquarters in the Bay Area. Ziying received her PhD with Prof. Nathan Gianneschi of Northwestern University Department of Chemistry – our second postdoc from Nathan’s group, the first of whom was Dr. Andrea S. Carlini, currently on the faculty in the Department of Chemistry at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Ziying decided to take a different but equally exciting career path, where she will use her deep knowledge of materials chemistry in an industrial research setting, much the same way that I started my own career at Bell Labs many years ago. Ziying had an amazing run in our group, leading or co-leading important efforts across a broad range, from laser-based methods for dry fabrication of transient electronics systems, to hydrogel chemistries for adhesive bioelectronic interfaces, to oxynitrides and multilayer assemblies as biofluid barriers in bioresorbable devices, to resorbable polymer complexes in platforms for controlled drug release. I am sure that Ziying will be a stand-out member of the technical staff at Lam, and I look forward to staying in touch with her as her career takes off! Thank you Ziying for all of your hard work, your creative ideas and your research accomplishments with us!

Congratulations to Jaehee Lee on accepting a position as a staff engineer at Samsung Electronics! Jaehee first joined the group a few years ago as a visiting PhD student from KAIST, where she was in the group of Prof. Keon Jae Lee – a highly successful faculty member and one of my first graduate students (co-advised by Prof. Ralph Nuzzo) when I was at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She later returned to our group as a postdoc with tremendous energy, skill and infectious optimism – working on some interesting projects in bioresorbable electronic nerve block technologies, as engineering approaches to pain mitigation. We’re delighted that she will be starting a long productive independent career in an industrial research lab – an environment that I found very stimulating and rewarding when I got my own start at Bell Labs. Best of luck Jaehee, and please stay in touch!!