[CCoE Notice] PhD Dissertation Defense Announcement

[Khator, Suresh]

[cid:image001.png at 01CC6CAC.F06F1C10]PhD Dissertation Announcement

Shape Engineered Nanoparticle Fabrication for Biomedical Applications
by
Azeem Nasrullah

Committee Chair:                Paul Ruchhoeft                            Place: SERC 1016
Committee Members:         Dmitri Litvinov                             Date: September 12th, 2011
Richard Willson                            Time: 11:00am
Randall Lee
Stanko Brankovic

Semiconductor fabrication research has developed technologies that allow for the deposition and patterning of thin films, and can be applied to many different industries, including the field of medicine. One such application is the fabrication of nanoparticles.  There are a wide variety of nanoparticle based medical diagnostics and therapies, including drug delivery and cancer imaging. Most of the nanoparticles being studied are chemically synthesized and spherical in shape, and studies have shown that other shapes can be more useful in certain applications, especially those that involve in vivo analysis and treatment. Fabrication of particles using a tool set developed from the semiconductor industry can allow for a detailed study of size and shape dependence on nanoparticle uptake in the bloodstream. Particle fabrication is achieved using thin film deposition, ion beam proximity lithography, wet etching, and lift-off, all similar to techniques commonly found in the semiconductor industry. The particles are formed using patterns developed with proximity lithography, and this represents the largest effort in this work. An ion beam, generated by a saddle-field ion source, is used to irradiate a polymeric resist with a thin membrane stencil mask placed in close proximity to the resist coated substrate in order to define the pattern. A saddle-field ion source was constructed and characterized for proximity lithography, with a beam diameter of 4.8 mm for a ±5% tolerance in current density, a source size range of 0.3-0.9 mm, an average brightness value of 15 nA/(cm2·sr), and average exposure times of ≈30 s. Stencil masks were fabricated from silicon nitride membranes in order to generate the pattern for the nanoparticles, and the particles were fabricated using a bi-layer resist and a sacrificial copper layer for release into solution.

_______________________________________________________
Suresh K. Khator, Ph.D., P.E.                         Phone: 713-743-4205
Associate Dean, College of Engineering    Fax: 713-743-4214
University of Houston                                     Email: skhator at uh.edu
E421 Engineering Bldg 2                                www.egr.uh.edu/ie
Houston, TX 77204-4008

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