IEEE Nanotechnology Council Chapter Meeting

6-6:45PM: Refreshments, Networking and Senior Membership.  Members interested in elevation to senior member level are encouraged to bring a copy of their resume.  We will facilitate the review process by assigning references.   If you have ten years of work experience with five years at significant level, you are eligible to be an IEEE senior member.

6:45PM The talk will begin.
Title:  Merging Biology and Nanoelectronics: Can a semiconductor operate as a human cell?
Speaker:  Prof. Jean-Pierre Leburton of University of Illinois Electrical and Computer Engineering Department
Location:  MITRE Corp., Building 2, Conference Room 1N100, 7515 Colshire Drive, McLean, VA
GPS: Latitude 38.92219 (+38° 55' 19.88") Longitude -77.20561 (-77° 12' 20.20")
Directions: See www.mitre.org/about/locations/va_mclean_mitre2.html. Park in the garage next to Building 2 shown on the Map URL. A walkway connects the garage to the lobby and the conference room. Parking is free.
RSVP:  https://meetings.vtools.ieee.org/meeting_view/list_meeting/11569.  Contact Murty Polavarapu murtyp@ieee.org  with any questions
 

Abstract: 
The ability to manipulate the enormous information resources contained in DNA molecules for applications in information technology is one of the new great scientific challenges at the cross road of biology, information science, physics and electrical engineering.

In this talk, I will briefly review the technological evolution of the MOS transistor, which is the basic element of microelectronic systems, and address the "end of the road" scenario for silicon technology. I will discuss revolutionary developments  in material nanotechnology, that give rise to promising concepts in device electronics for the next generation of information processing systems. Among these new ideas, I will present a scenario that integrates biology and physics with MOS nano-electronics for probing the electrical activity of DNA molecules thereby providing a mean to identify electronically their molecular sequences.  In this context, semiconductor membranes made of two thin layers of opposite n- and p-doping can perform electrically tunable ion current rectification and filtering  in a nanopore, which are fundamental functions of biological membranes surrounding human cells, and can help in the DNA sequencing process.
* Work done in collaboration with M. Gracheva, A. Aksimentiev and G. Timp, and supported by the NIH grant PHS 1 RO1 HG003713 A

Speaker Bio:
Jean-Pierre Leburton received his Ph.D. from the University of Liege (Belgium) in 1978. He is a professor in the UIUC Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a research professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory. He is also a full-time faculty member of the Computational Electronics Group in the Beckman Institute.

Professor Leburton's expertise is the theory and simulation of nanoscale semiconductor devices and low-dimensional systems. His research focuses more specifically on transport and optical processes in semiconductor nanostructures such as quantum wells, quantum wires and quantum dots. Current research projects involve electronic properties of self-assembled dots for high performance lasers, single-electron charging and spin effects in quantum dots, modeling of nanocrystal floating gate flash memory devices, nanoscale Si MOSFET's and carbon nanotubes and graphene nanostructures. His research deals also with dissipative mechanisms involving electron-phonon interaction in nanostructures for mid- and far-infrared intra-band lasers. Approaches to these problems involve use of sophisticated numerical techniques such as Monte-Carlo simulation and advanced 3D self-consistent Schroedinger-Poisson model including non-equilibrium transport for full scale nanodevice modeling. In the last few years, he turned his interest toward the interaction between living systems and semiconductors to investigate programming and sensing biomolecules with nanoelectronics.