【The Next Industrial Paradigm】Timothy Swager：Electronic and Optical Soft Materials

Electronic and Optical Soft-Materials for High-Performance Sensors Abstract: This lecture will detail the creation of ultrasensitive sensors based on electronically and optically active organic materials. A central theme of Prof. Swager's research is to produce materials that provide large responses to chemical stimuli that can lead to simplified hardware requirements to create sensors. Low-cost sensors enabled by these soft-materials can be used to create distributed networks and point of care healthcare technologies. The simplest sensor to integrate with any electronic component is a chemiresistor. Chemiresistors can also be operated in a field effect configuration, where applied gate potentials can provide improved sensitivity and selectivity. Selectivity is critical in any sensor, and orthogonality between different analytes is key to developing any useful sensor. He will detail chemical concepts on how to achieve high selectivity in chemical sensors with applications relevant to agriculture and safety. Prof. Swager will also discuss the use of exciton transport in electronic polymers to produce amplified fluorescence responses. These methods have broad utility in chemical and biosensing, including the detection of perfluoroalkane substances (PFAS) at ppt levels. Additional optical biosensor modalities will be presented for the detection of analytes including pathogenic bacteria.