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February 08, 2002
New Job!
Friday, February 8, 2002
Wow. It's been quite a couple of weeks! Since I last wrote lo these many moons ago, I've landed a research assistant (read: flunky) position with one of my professors here at UTA, Dr. Shiv Joshi. Several grad students and a couple of us undergraduates are going to be building two machines. One is a nanopulse titanium-sapphire laser machining system. This device will be used to fabricate embossing blanks used to mass-produce MEMS, or micro-electro-mechanical systems. Said embossing blanks are going to be put into the second machine, which will actually press the parts out of some weird polymer goop.
This is real science-fiction stuff. The plan is to mass produce tiny tiny little contraptions that can be injected into a patient, travel through their bloodstream to the area of interest, and transmit data collected from on-board sensor systems to a console outside the patient. The devices will then be simply excreted like any other waste product, and, well, flushed. Current MEMS are very expensive, and are not practical for use where retrieval would be complicated (or, in the case of medical applications, messy).
So this is cool stuff. Click here to see a bunch of links I'm using to get up to speed on this stuff. Once we get our lab set up, I'll provide a link to the project web page.
I'm a bit excited about this. Can you tell?
Posted by Lee at 01:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack