Abstract
This talk will introduce micro-and nanorobots and their potential to revolutionize medicine. One of the main goals of microrobots is to make medical interventions more targeted and less invasive. Nano-and microrobots show great potential for active and remote-controlled motion inside the human body. Possible future applications include active, targeted delivery of therapeutics to diseased sites (e.g. tumours), cell delivery for regenerative therapy and non-invasive surgery. The removal of obstructions inside the body such as blood clots, renal stones or other blockages in a minimal invasive manner is another main subject of our research. This talk will give an overview of the very interdisciplinary research that combines expertise from robotics, medicine, engineering, chemistry and biology.
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Speaker: Assistant Professor Veronika Magdanz, PhD
Assistant Professor Dr. Veronika Magdanz is developing wireless small scale magnetic robots for biomedical applications. One of the challenges for remotely controlled microrobots is finding efficient power sources on the microscale. Veronika Magdanz uses different approaches spanning from biohybrid to magnetic actuation to power these tiny machines.
Magdanz studied Biotechnology at the Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany, and conducted her PhD studies at the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research IFW Dresden. During her PhD, she pioneered the development of a novel type of microrobots driven by motile sperm cells. To do so, she used rolled-up nanotechnology to fabricate ferromagnetic nanomembranes that are able to capture single sperm cells and allow the capture, remote magnetic control and release of single motile sperm cells.
From 2017-2020, she was Open Topic Postdoc at the Technische Universität Dresden, Germany, investigating sperm migration and sperm-particle interactions for the development of diagnostic tools for reproductive biology.
In 2020, Veronika Magdanz was awarded a Feodor-Lynen Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which allowed her to join the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain. From 2020-2022, she developed flexible magnetic microrobots for cell delivery and 3D printing of muscle tissue. In 2021, she received a Junior leader Fellowship from the La Caixa Foundation.
The expertise of Dr. Magdanz is highly interdisciplinary and ranges from microfabrication to cell biology, material science and magnetic actuation. She has published over 40 peer-reviewed articles, many of them in high impact journals.
Veronika Magdanz is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo, supporting the Biomedical Engineering program as a core member.