The Department of Chemical Engineering welcomes you to a seminar by Dr. Hamed Shahsavan, who will be speaking about soft stimuli-responsive and shape programmable materials in the design and fabrication of microscale robots and devices.
Abstract
Development of microscale devices and robots is a multidisciplinary theme that links different fields of research, such as biology, materials science, instrumentation and control, and artificial intelligence. During the last decade, this theme of research has played a significant role in the understanding, development and application of microscale medical devices and robots. In this regard, the structural materials that can be scaled down by various microfabrication techniques and integrate sensing, actuating and powering tasks in constructs with less number of components are highly desired.
In this seminar, Dr Shahsavan will show the importance of soft stimuli-responsive and shape programmable materials in the design and fabrication of microscale robots and devices. He will introduce a class of soft materials with the shape-change programmability that can be remotely stimulated by a variety of cues, such as heat, light, electrical and magnetic fields, at different scales. He will also present opportunities to create novel solutions or augment existing capabilities of microscale robotic systems with an emphasis on their future biomedical applications.
Biographical Sketch
Dr. Hamed Shahsavan is an NSERC post-doctoral fellow at the Physical Intelligence Department of Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany. He obtained his MASc and PhD in Chemical Engineering and Nanotechnology from the University of Waterloo. He was a visiting research scientist in Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute at Kent State University in the USA, and in Smart Photonic Materials group at Tampere University in Finland.
Dr. Shahsavan received the Early Stage Career Award from International Liquid Crystal Elastomer Conference in 2015. His research interests include biomimetic and smart materials, soft-robotics, bioinspired surfaces, contact mechanics and interfacial phenomena, at micro/nanoscales.
His current research focuses on the development of new generations of mobile robots and devices based on anisotropic stimuli-responsive materials, such as liquid crystal networks, at different scales for emerging biomedical technologies.