To be announced

Flexible nano-electronics via large-area manufacturing paradigms

Thomas D. Anthopoulos is a Professor of Material Science and Engineering at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia, where he has been since January 2017. He received his B.Eng. and D.Phil. degrees from Staffordshire University in UK. He then spent two years at the University of St. Andrews (UK) where he worked on new materials for application in organic light-emitting diodes before join Philips Research Laboratories in The Netherlands to focus on organic transistors and printed microelectronics. From 2006 to 2017 he held faculty positions at Imperial College London (UK), first as an EPSRC Advanced Fellow and later as a Reader and Professor of Experimental Physics. His research interests are diverse and cover the development and application of novel processing paradigms and the physics, chemistry & application of functional materials.

Laser-based 3D printing at the nanoscale

Dr. Maria Farsari is Director of Research at IESL-FORTH, where she joined in 2003. Her main research interests are multi-photon lithography, laser-based fabrication of 2D and 3D micro and nano structures, and materials processing using ultrafast lasers. She is the author of 80 peer-reviewed publications, and she has given more than 50 invited talks at international conferences.

Dr. Farsari received her undergraduate degree in 1992 from the Physics Department, University of Crete and her PhD in 1997 from the Physics Department, University of Durham, UK, where she was a Marie Curie fellow during the period 1992-1994. The subject of her PhD was organic nonlinear optics. After graduating, she worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Universities of Durham and Sussex and as a Senior Optical Scientist for the security company DeLaRue Holographics. She was a founding member of the Dublin company Xsil Ltd.

What can and cannot be done with Superhydrophobic, or Omniphobic surfaces?

Alidad Amirfazli is a Professor at the York University in Toronto, Canada, where he founded the Department of Mechanical Engineering in 2013. He formerly held the Canada Research Chair in Surface Engineering at the University of Alberta, Canada. Amirfazli has produced exciting results in wetting behavior of surfaces, drop adhesion and shedding, drop impact, icing, direct laser patterning of self- assembled monolayers and super-hydrophobic surfaces. He has had more than 250 scientific contributions, many in prestigious peer reviewed journals; he has also given many invited talks at international level. He is the Editor for the Advances in Colloid and Interface Science, Associate Editor for Interfacial Phenomena & Heat Transfer, and an Editorial board member for other journals. Dr. Amirfazli has been the recipient of the Martha Cook Piper Research prize, Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award, and Killam Annual Professorship. He is a Fellow of the Engineering Institute in Canada, and CSME. In 2014 he was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. He also served in the board of Professional Engineers of Alberta, and has been a consultant with various companies in USA, Europe, and Canada.

Biomimetics of photosynthetic photonic structures. How natural light harvesting could become an inspiration for nanotechnology

Dr. Martin Lopez-Garcia is since 2018 head of the Natural and Artificial Photonic Structures Group at the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory in Braga, Portugal. His research focuses on bioinspired strategies to manipulate light at micro and nano-scale. He is especially interested in the interplay between photonic structures and photosynthesis as a new strategy towards green energy production. His past and current work combines the understanding of the biophysics of photosynthetic photonic systems and the development of nanofabrication technologies for the biomimetics of such systems.

Acoustofluidics - A sound approach to liquid biopsies

Thomas Laurell received his PhD in electrical engineering in 1995 at Lund University and obtained a position as associate professor in 1998 at Lund University. He holds a position as Professor in Medical and Chemical Microsensors since 2000 with a focus on Lab-On-A-Chip technologies in biomedicine at the Dept. of Biomedical Engineering. In 2005, Laurell co-founded the Chemical and Biological Microsystems Society, CBMS, the ruling body of the MicroTAS conference series and has served as President since 2009. He has also cofounded the Centre of Excellence in Biological and Medical Mass Spectrometry, a national infrastructure node at Lund University. In 2009, Laurell was appointed Distinguished Professor at Dongguk University, Dept. Biomedical Engineering, Seoul, Korea and he is an elected Fellow of School of Engineering, Tokyo University since 2015. Laurell is also an elected member of: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, The Royal Academy of Engineering Sciences, and The Royal Physiographic Society. He has served as the Chairman for division VII, Royal Academy of Engineering Sciences 2009-2014. Laurell has published over 200 peer reviewed scientific publications, filed 31 patent applications, (h-index: 44–ISI Web of Science) and has co-founded 4 start-up companies. Total research funding ≈260 MSEK. He is currently directing a Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation funded project 2013-18 (38 MSEK) on acoustofluidics in medical applications, as well as the Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF) funded biomedical synergy grant 2014-19 (33 MSEK) on acoustofluidic purification of exosomes, microvesicles and bacteria in clinical diagnostic applications.

From Cells-on-Chip to Chips-in-Cell: our fantastic “voyage”

Ph.D. J.A. Plaza was born in Cerdanyola del Vallès (Barcelona), Spain in 1968. He received his Physicist degree and his Ph. D. degree in Electronics Engineering from UAB (1992, 1997). He focused his Ph. thesis on mechanical silicon-based accelerometers at IMB-CNM (CSIC). Since 1995, he has the degree of Specialist in Finite Element Simulation from the UNED, Spain. He did a posdoctoral stay at SINTEF, Oslo (Norway), working on mechanical sensors and bonding techniques between wafers. He returned to the IMB-CNM on 2000 and his research was been focused on the design, simulation, technology development and characterization of Micro- and Nanosystems. Currently, he is the group leader of the Micro- and NanoTools group at IMB-CNM (CSIC). He has participated on 8 consecutive coordinated projects of the spanish -Plan Nacional-, the last 7 as Project Coordinator. He has more than 100 contributions to scientific journals (WOK-JCR indexed) and more than 100 contributions to international conferences on MEMS and NEMS. He has also supervised 8 doctoral thesis. In 2005 his group started a new research line, the posibility to reduce the size of a silicon chips to an amount which could introduce them inside living cells. Thus, they are focused on the development of Suspended Chips (silicon-ba\sed chips smaller than living cells) for Life science applications. So, they managed to prove the concepts of Chip-on-a-Cell and Chip-in-a-Cell. They demonstrated in 2013 the first intracellular silicon chip, a mechanical sensor, which can detect pressure changes inside living cells and transmits the information without any physical contact. In 2015, they demonstrated a suspended planar array chip for molecular multiplexing inside a living cell, which is the technological base of the Array 4 Cells Nanodevices company.