In gas sensor field, MEMS technology is normally considered as a micro-machining method to batch fabricate micro hotplates for miniaturization. However, this presentation will provide more meaningful novel usage of MEMS technology for gas sensing optimization, where MEMS devices are developed to quantitatively detect chemical heat of adsorption/reaction of sensing material with the targeted gaseous molecules. Firstly, a DTA (differential thermal analysis) style integrated MEMS chip is proposed to precisely measure the chemical heat of hydrogen molecules with oxygen at the sensing material, thereby an ultra-sensitive hydrogen sensor is achieved to realize 1ppm hydrogen detection within 2 seconds. Then, an integrated MEMS resonant-microcantilever with self-heating function is proposed to in-situ measure thermodynamic/kinetic parameters at the sensing-material interface with the targeted gas molecules. In this way the adsorption heat at the interface can be quantitatively measured to guide optimal design of various gas sensing materials. Thereafter, an in-situ TPD (temperature programmed desorption) method is built based on the self-heating MEMS resonant-cantilever for evaluation and optimal selection of sensing materials. Two case studies are introduced where the in-situ oxygen-TPD is performed to guide optimization of metal oxide semiconductor style gas sensors and another ammonia-TPD is exhibited to realize great enhancement of catalytic sensing materials. In conclusion, advanced MEMS technological tools can by developed to greatly help gas sensors with in-situ measurement and analysis of chemical heat.

Xinxin Li received B.S. degree from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1987, and Ph.D. degree from Fudan University, Shanghai, China, in 1998. He was engaged as Research Associate in Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, Research Fellow in Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and Lecturer (COE Fellowship) in Tohoku University, Japan. Since 2001, he has been a Professor of Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinses Academy of Sciences, where he has served as the director of State Key Lab of Transducer Technology of China. He is also an Adjunct Professor for Fudan University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Dalian University of Technology, ShanghaiTech University, and Suzhou University. From 2009 to 2013, he was a Consultant Professor for World Class University Program of Korean in Chonnam National University, Korea. His research interest includes micro/nano sensors and MEMS/NEMS technology. He was granted the National Science Fund of China for Distinguished Young Scholar in 2007. His Ph.D. student was awarded National Excellent 100 Ph.D. Dissertation in 2009. He has invented more than 100 patents and published more than 600 articles in refereed journals and conferences (including about 300 SCI journal articles), with total citation of more than 10 thousands. He served as TPC member for the conferences of IEEE MEMS and IEEE Sensors. He has been served to Transducers as ETPC member, International Steering Committee member and Asia/Oceania regional TPC Chair. He is the Editorial Member for J Micromech. Microeng., Microsystema and Nanoengineering, Scientific Reports, and Micromachines.

The emerging nano-bio interfaces have created new opportunities for developing advanced sensing technologies with unparalleled sensitivity and specificity. In this talk, I will present the development of conformal nano-bio interfaces that allow for the seamless integration of nanoelectronic interfaces into biological systems for sense digitalization with maintaining function even under deformed states. In addition, I will discuss the recent development of a biphasic, nano-dispersed (BIND) interface that can reliably connect soft, rigid, and encapsulation modules without the need for pastes. This interface was used to create stretchable devices for in vivo neuromodulation and on-skin electromyography. The modular integration improves signal quality and electrode performance, simplifying and accelerating the development of on-skin and implantable stretchable devices.

Professor Xiaodong Chen is the President's Chair Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, as well as Professor of Chemistry and Medicine (by courtesy) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore. Professor Chen's research interests include mechanomaterials science and engineering, flexible electronics technology, sense digitalization, cyber-human interfaces and systems, and carbon negative technology. He has received numerous accolades for his exceptional scientific contributions, including the Singapore President Science Award, Singapore National Research Foundation (NRF) Investigatorship and NRF Fellowship, a winner of Falling Walls, Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award, and Dan Maydan Prize in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. He is also Fellow of the Singapore National Academy of Science, the Academy of Engineering Singapore, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the Chinese Chemical Society, and serves on the editorial advisory boards of more than 16 globally renowned journals, including Advanced Materials and Small. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of ACS Nano, a flagship journal in nanoscience and nanotechnology.

This lecture will detail the creation of ultrasensitive sensors based on electronically active conjugated polymers (CPs) and carbon nanotubes (CNTs). A central concept that a single nano- or molecular-wire spanning between two electrodes would create an exceptional sensor if binding of a molecule of interest to it would block all electronic transport. The use of molecular electronic circuits to give signal gain is not limited to electrical transport and CP-based fluorescent sensors can provide ultratrace detection of chemical vapors via amplification resulting from exciton migration. Nanowire networks of CNTs provide for a practical approximation to the single nanowire scheme. High sensitivity needs to be paired with high selectivity to create sensors with real-world utility. To this end, I will detail a number of transduction mechanisms that make use of receptors (biological and synthetic), selective catalytic processes, and the unique characteristics of the analytes of interest. Transduction events that result in changes in the Fermi levels of materials are particularly effective. Analyte triggered oxidation can create devices, including lateral flow assays (LFAs) based on CPs, that display nearly 1,000,000% change in resistivity. New generations electronic LFAs will be detailed, which when combined with radio frequency identification (RFID) technology creates wireless, highly sensitive, sensors for use in medical diagnostics and environmental monitoring.

Timothy M. Swager is the John D. MacArthur Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A native of Montana, he received a BS from Montana State University in 1983 and a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1988. After a postdoctoral appointment at MIT he was on the chemistry faculty at the University of Pennsylvania 1990-1996 and returned to MIT in 1996 as a Professor of Chemistry and served as the Head of Chemistry from 2005-2010. He has published more than 500 peer-reviewed papers and more than 120 issued/pending patents. Swager’s honors include: Election to the National Academy of Sciences, an Honorary Doctorate from Montana State University, National Academy of Inventors Fellow, The Pauling Medal, The Lemelson-MIT Award for Invention and Innovation, Election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The American Chemical Society Award for Creative Invention, The American Chemical Society Award in Polymer Chemistry, The Christopher Columbus Foundation Homeland Security Award, and The Carl S. Marvel Creative Polymer Chemistry Award (ACS).
Swager’s research interests are in design, synthesis, and study of organic-based electronic, sensory, energy harvesting, membrane, high-strength, liquid crystalline, and colloid materials. His liquid crystal designs demonstrated shape complementarity to generate specific interactions between molecules and includes fundamental mechanisms for increasing liquid crystal order by a new mechanism referred to as minimization of free volume. Swager’s research in electronic polymers has been mainly directed at the demonstration of new conceptual approaches to the construction of sensory materials. These methods are the basis of the FidoTM explosives detectors (FLIR Systems Inc), which have the highest sensitivity of any explosives sensor. Other areas actively investigated by the Swager group include radicals for dynamic nuclear polarization, applications of nano-carbon materials, organic photovoltaic materials, polymer actuators, separation membranes, and luminescent molecular probes for medical diagnostics. He has founded five companies (DyNuPol, Iptyx, PolyJoule, C2 Sense and Xibus Systems) and has served on a number of corporate and government boards.

TBA

Luisa Torsi received her Laurea degree in Physics from the University of Bari in 1989 and a Ph.D. in Chemical Sciences from the same institution in 1993. She was a post-doctoral fellow at Bell Labs from 1994 to 1996. In 2005 and 2006 she was invited-professor at the University of Anger and Paris 7. Since 2005 she is a full professor of chemistry at the University of Bari and since 2017, she is an adjunct professor at the Abo Academy University in Finland.
In 2010 she has been awarded the Heinrich Emanuel Merck prize for analytical sciences, marking the first time the award has been given to a woman. The IUPAC - International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry awarded her with the 2019 Distinguished Women in Chemistry or Chemical Engineering. The analytical chemistry division of the European Chemical Society (EuChemS) conferred her the Robert Kellner Lecturer 2019. Prof. Luisa Torsi is also the winner of the Wilhelm Exner Medal 2021, a prize awarded since 1921 by the Austrian Industrial Association to celebrate excellence in science. The Exner Medal awardees include also more than twenty Nobel prizes. The Italian President, Sergio Mattarella invited Prof. Torsi at the Quirinale to personally congratulate her on this award.
Since 2020 she has been appointed National Representative for the Marie Sk?odowska-Curie Action of Horizon Europe by the Italian Minister for Education and Research. She is also past-president of the European Material Research Society, the first woman to serve in this role. Torsi has been also elected 2017 Fellow of this society, for pioneering work in the field of organic (bio) electronic sensors and their use for point-of-care testing. She is also Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry since 2022. Presently she is serving as Vice-President of the Scientific Committee of the Italian National Research Council.
Awarded research funding for over 30 million € comprises several European contracts as well as national and regional projects. She is coordinating the “Single molecule bio-electronic smart system array for clinical testing – SiMBiT” a H2020-ICT-2018-2020 research and innovation action working on liquid biopsy for pancreatic cancer early detection. She has also coordinated a “European Industrial Doctorate” Marie Curie project in collaboration with Merck and a Marie Curie ITN European network as well as several national PRIN projects; was also a principal investigator in an ICT STREP proposal. She has also been the scientific coordinator of a Structural Reinforcement PON Project awarded to UNIBA for 2012-2014 and is engaged with several other Structural Reinforcement PON projects.
Torsi has authored almost 230 ISI papers, including papers published in Science, Nature Materials, Nature Communications, PNAS, Advanced Materials, and is co-inventor of several international awarded patents. Her works gathered almost 15.500 Google scholar citations resulting in an h-index of 60. She has given over190 invited lectures, including almost 50 plenary and keynotes contributions to international conferences.
Prof. Torsi is committed to the role of model for younger women scientists. She has been giving several talks on this topic such as a TEDx talk. Prof. Torsi is one of the 100Experts (https://100esperte.it) a project led by Fondazione Bracco comprising an online databank with the names and CVs of female experts in STEM, a sector historically underrepresented by women but strategic for the economic and social development. In a recent campaign to foster the idea of gender equality in science among children, prof. Torsi was featured in a story of TOPOLINO (Italian comic digest-size series of Disney comics), as “Louise Torduck”, a successful female scientist of the Calisota valley.

Laser spectroscopy utilizes the "fingerprint" spectral signature of molecules and has unique advantage in specificity. However, traditional laser gas spectroscopy systems use discrete components and open-path gas cells (sensing unit), which are difficult to align, large-in-size, and have stability problems when used outdoor. Here we talk about fiber-enhanced laser spectroscopy for gas sensing. Microstructured hollow-core or nano-core optical fibers are used as gas cells, which have special waveguiding, thermodynamic and acoustic properties, and could enhance the interaction of light, gas molecules, and fiber structures (materials) significantly. The fiber gas cells may be flexibly connected to other fiber-based photonic components to form relatively complex circuits for robust and high precision measurement of optical phase and intensity, promoting practical applications of spectroscopic gas sensing and instrumentation. In this presentation, I will discuss the basics of gas detection with optical fibers, report recent progress, and discuss possible future research directions.

Wei Jin holds the position of Chair Professor of Photonic Instrumentation at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU). He obtained BEng from Beihang University and PhD from University of Strathclyde, UK. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Strathclyde University before joining PolyU as Assistant Professor in 1996. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1998 and Professor in 2003. He has published over 300 Journal papers and successfully supervised >30 PhDs. He received PolyU President Awards (twice) for Outstanding Performance in Research, PolyU Outstanding Professional Service and Innovation Award for technology transfer, NSFC Distinguished Oversea Young Scholar Award, MOE Chiang Jiang Chair Professor Award, and 2020 China’s Top Ten Optical Breakthroughs in applied research category. He is a Fellow of Optica and a director of Chinese Optical Society. He was the Co-Chair of the 25th International Conference on Optical Fiber Sensors (OFS-25) and the Technical Chair of OFS-22.