Building Blocks: for Integrated Electronics and Biomedical Analysis

Over the past five decades, the world has made rapid technological progress supported by the advancement in solid-state electronics and photonics. Referred to as the Moore’s Law, the fundamental mechanism for making a better microprocessor chip has been the reduction of footprint of individual operational units (field effect transistors), thus increasing the chip functionality and performance by increasing planar density. However, there is an impending problem. Improving integrated circuits by device miniaturization is coming to an end, since device miniaturization is reaching its fundamental physical limit. A potential novel approach for continued improvement is a three dimensional (3D) multifunctional integrated circuit. However, there are several challenges associated with fabricating a 3D IC. The first part of this talk will be aimed at describing my results of some novel materials growth and device fabrication approaches to address some of these fundamental problems.
The second part of this talk will touch upon my current research efforts towards realizing spatiotemporal single cell analysis. To elucidate with an example, different cell types of the same cancer tumour behave differently in the same nominal microenvironment. This has led to significant efforts to identify individual cells and cell types separately, and study each individual cell’s protein, RNA and DNA signatures, to ultimately give rise to a more comprehensive understanding of the ensemble behaviour of the entire tissue. However, currently, there is a lack of an appropriate scalable method to simultaneously identify and track the spatiotemporal behaviour of all individual cell types of a cancer tumour, and thereby analyse the interaction of each of those cells in their microenvironment. I will present some of my results of creating “precision laser particles” as optical barcodes towards realizing such spatiotemporal single cell analysis.
Biography: Dr. Debarghya Sarkar (dsarkar2@mgh.harvard.edu) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital. His present research is on applications of semiconducting laser devices as intracellular biophotonic probes. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California and his Bachelor’s degree from Jadavpur University, both in Electrical Engineering. His doctoral research was on a novel heterogeneous semiconductor integration technique geared towards enabling future 3D integrated circuits, flexible electronics and neuromorphic computing. Debarghya was awarded the Best Dissertation Award from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering (Ballhaus Prize 2020), a Best Student Paper Award at the Electronic Materials Conference 2019, a Graduate Research Award at the American Vacuum Society Conference 2020, the USC EE Charles Weber Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award 2018 (honourable mention), and the departmental gold medal in his undergraduate. He has authored or co-authored over 15 peer-reviewed journal publications, and has co-authored a book chapter on nanowire field effect transistors. He
is an MIT Catalyst 2022 Fellow, and was previously a USC Annenberg Endowed Research Ph.D. Fellow 2019 and Ming Hsieh Institute Ph.D. Scholar 2018. Debarghya is the immediate past chair of the Science Communications subcommittee at the Mass General Postdoc Association. He also co-founded and is the leading organizer for the Jagadis Bose Scholars Professional Development Forum, comprised of scholars across the years receiving the JBNSTS scholarship in India. Besides research, he currently explores gardening and capturing the flora and fauna of Boston with his camera, as his main hobbies.