Image: Jonathan Rivnay, Bryan Paulsen (Northwestern University).
From optoelectronic to biomedical and energy storage applications, the interest in organic mixed ionic–electronic conductors is expanding. This Review describes current understanding of the processes occurring in these materials and their structure–property relations.
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IEEE Brain Initiative announced the launch of the inaugural IEEE Brain Virtual Conference. The first event, was held 26 November 2019, explored the emerging field of bioelectronics featuring Professor Rivnay as one of their speakers!
Bioelectronics is a rapidly growing field that develops electronic systems to intelligently interact with biological tissue for applications spanning healthcare, lifestyle, and education. In this virtual conference you will learn fundamental principles of bioelectronic systems and hear from world experts about how to build a successful career in this emerging research field.
Read our latest review of organic mixed ionic-electronic conductors review in Nature Materials with Klas Tybandt (Linköping University), Eleni Stavrinidou (Linköping University), and our own post-doc Bryan Paulsen (Northwestern University), and Dr. Jonathan Rivnay (Northwestern University).
According to Dr. Rivnay:
Our understanding of this complex class of materials is constantly changing and evolving, but we do our best to focus on current materials, development approaches, transport and charging processes, and structure-property relations.
Northwestern Engineering faculty members Jonathan Rivnay, Aggelos K. Katsaggelos, and Todd Parrish are members of teams that were granted $55,000 in seed money through the Collaborative Research Catalyst Awards.
Rivnay, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, will team with Wellington Hsu, a spine surgeon, and Erin Hsu, a bone biologist, both in the department of Orthopaedic Surgery in the Feinberg School of Medicine, to study a novel technique for bone regeneration and spine fusion. All three are members of the Simpson Querrey Institute.
Congratulations to all award recipients!
Our lab is excited to welcome Juliana Trujillo! She comes from Santa Clara University as a Bioengineering major. She’ll be spending her summer in the lab as an International Institute for Nanotechnology (IIN) REU student! We asked Juliana what she’s currently working on:
I am currently working on developing conductive polymers in a 3D printed scaffold under variable conditions to optimize the conductivity. I am analyzing these polymers with a potentiostat and hopefully soon with SEM and EDX.
We’re excited to have you!
The first conference on Bioelectronics seeks to establish an interdisciplinary community of scientists and engineers working on problems related to Bioelectronics. Challenges in the emerging field span length scales including the nanoscale structure and chemistry of materials and biomolecules, the macroscopic scale of device function and performance and integration with organisms, and at the mesoscale where organic and synthetic materials are combined with cells and interact.
Jonathan Rivnay is named a 2019 Sloan Fellow in Chemistry, awarded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This award will continue to fund our work developing and understanding organic mixed conductors, and will allow us to pilot new concepts in applications in organic bioelectronic regenerative engineering and neural interfacing.
Follow the links for the formal press release from the Sloan Foundation, as well as the full list of this year’s fellows.
You can also read the coverage from Northwestern, and Northwestern Engineering.
Our paper “Role of the Anion on the Transport and Structure of Organic Mixed Conductors” is published in Advanced Functional Materials. Congratulations to Camila, and the entire team. This article highlights the effects of the anion on structure, self-doping, and thus transport and device performance using a suite of electrochemical, structural, spectroscopic and gravimetric probes. Read it online – open access
A continued multinational collaboration with McCulloch, Salleo, and Inal groups!
Prof. Jonathan Rivnay was honored on January 2-6, 2019 as a “Rising Star” of the Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering (CMBE) special interest group of the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES), at the annual CMBE conference held this year in San Diego, CA. Jonathan was one of six early stage PIs recognized this year, and he presented on the group’s new efforts on conductive hydrogels for regenerative engineering applications. It was a pleasure and honor to be among such a stellar group of assistant professors!
New review paper is out in Organic Electronics, “Device Physics of Organic Electrochemical Transistors” – as opus by Jacob Friedlein is out. Unlike other reviews in OECTs that focus on chemistry of materials, or give a broad overview of applications, this review highlights aspects related to device physics: scaling behaviors, modeling and disorder, and non-idealities related to parasitic resistance. A must read for any OECT afficionato.
Download it here – open access.
Congrats to Mayra who placed in 3rd for the SQI image contest!
Her image shown here is a polarized optical microscope image of conducting polymer fibrils being investigated for regenerative engineering applications.
Vishak’s paper “Subthreshold Operation of Organic Electrochemical Transistors for Biosignal Amplification” is now online at Advanced Science. Congratulations, Vishak! This work details the use of OECTs with sharp subthreshold slopes (60 mV/dec) for EEG amplification circuits. We show low power consumption and stability in subthreshold operation. Transconductance efficiencyis the key! Read it online — open access.
Thanks to the McLeod group (Boulder) and materials from McCulloch group (Imperial/KAUST) for making this possible.
Prof. Jonathan Rivnay awarded an NSF CAREER award for “Understanding the Role of Structure on Ionic/Electronic Properties in Polymeric Mixed Conductors.”
In addition to studies of structure and transport in materials relevant for bioelectronics, the group aims to enhance science communication through community engagement, exploring the effect of the duration of outreach events on the development of researchers as teachers/mentors.
Read more about it from Northwestern University.
Collaborative effort with Iain McCulloch (KAUST/Imperial) shows the importance of side-chain engineering for tuning the transistor operating regimes and electrochemical properties of promising electron-transporting polymers. Check out “The Role of the Side Chain on the Performance of N-type Conjugated Polymers in Aqueous Electrolytes” out now in Chemistry of Materials.
New work in collaboration with Iain McCulloch (KAUST/Imperial), highlights design rules to address stability of BDT-based organic semiconductors for bioelectronic applications. Check out “Redox-Stability of Alkoxy-BDT Copolymers and their Use for Organic Bioelectronic Devices” out now in Advanced Functional Materials.
Read our latest overview on Organic Electrochemical Transistor (OECT) materials, devices, technology and applications, published in Nature Reviews Materials with Sahika Inal (KAUST), Alberto Salleo (Stanford), Roisin Owens (Cambridge), Magnus Berggren (Linkoping), and George Malliaras (Cambridge).
This is a solid overview for anyone looking to learn about and to explore the latest in OECTs.
Welcome to Yu Zhang, who will be visiting the lab for 6 months from Prof. Ni Zhao’s group at Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).
Also out in 2017: Our new work on proper comparison and benchmarking of active materials for bioelectronic applications (in this case: electrochemical transistors) was published in Nature Communications: “Benchmarking organic mixed conductors for transistors”.
Check out also the press release from Northwestern
With new lab space and equipment, we welcome our post-doc, Vishak Venkatraman, and two new PhD students: Reem Rashid (BME), and Mayra Celene Cortez Alcaraz (BME). They all started in the Summer/Fall 2017 — check out the People section to learn more about them.
Highlight from 2017, in case you missed it: Jonathan published a review article with the Malliaras (Cambridge) and Deisseroth (Stanford) groups in Science Advances. “Next-generation probes, particles, and proteins for neural interfacing
