JHU Biomedical Engineering

The BME Mechanical Instrument Shop is available to all School of Medicine Principal Investigators and their associates.

We have an extensive inventory and are capable of working with any material you may require.

We also have excellent sources for special components and supplies, CNC machining and sheet metal forming/fabrications.

Tissue Culture Facilities
The department has two shared, state-of-the-art tissue culture rooms, each equipped with two biosafety cabinets, and numerous cell-culture incubators. These facilities are shared among multiple laboratories. In addition, several laboratories have their own tissue culture facilities for dedicated tissue-engineering applications.

Microscope Facilities
The department has a Nikon epifluorescence microscope equipped with a CCD camera for digital imaging. This unit is a core facility, available to departmental members at large. In addition, the department has an Olympus Fluoview 300, laser-scanning confocal microscope that is shared among several departmental laboratories that competed successfully for an NIH shared instrumentation grant. The confocal microscope is equipped for simultaneous electrophysiological/patch-clamp recording, and has custom lasers permitting CFP/YFP FRET imaging.

BME Mechanical Instrument Shop
The BME Mechanical Instrument Shop is available to all School of Medicine Principal Investigators and their associates.
Our Specialty is:
- Design assistance
- Precision custom fabrication for any and all research/clinical projects and devices
We have an extensive inventory and are capable of working with any material you may require. We also have excellent sources for special components and supplies, CNC machining and sheet metal forming/fabrications.

Whitaker Institute Lithography and Fabrication Facility
Supported by the Whitaker Foundation, the lithography and fabrication facility in Clark Hall is established as a multidisciplinary focus point at the Homewood campus to facilitate research and education for undergraduate and graduate students in the area of microfabrication and system integration. Activities in the laboratory emphasize the use of modern lithography and fabrication technologies as tools for biological research in neuroscience, tissue engineering and molecular dynamics as well as in medical applications for novel therapeutics, artificial tissues, drug and gene delivery and MEMS microsensors.

The facility includes a 1300 square feet of class 1000 cleanroom space to carry fabrication processes such as photolithography, thin film deposition, oxidation, and surface and bulk etching. The laboratory is operated as a shared facility and it is staffed by a full-time lab manager, Mr. Huy Vo huyvo@bme.jhu.edu who is responsible for its maintenance, student training and safety. Prof. Andreou is the current director of the facility.

Access to the Facility
Individuals can access the facility by following the procedures outlined in the "How Do I Become a User" (pdf) document. You will need to read the the "Lab Safety Manual" (pdf) and sign "Certification Form" (pdf).
Faculty and Research

Nitish Thakor (Biomedical Engineering and Whitaker Institute)

Prof. Thakor is interested in developing micro and nanotechnologies for medical sensors and instrumentation. His primary medical focus is developing the technology for neuroscience research and studying basic brain diseases and disorders using micro and nanotechnologies. Under the sponsorship of the National Institute of Neurological Disorder and Stroke, he is currently developing a carbon microsensor and a related carbon nanosensor for detection of neurotransmitters from brain cells and tissue. The sensor is interfaced to a custom designed very large scale integrated (VLSI) circuit potentiostat chip to provide the interface and digital conversion. His laboratory has also developed a microelectrode mechanisms for recording from brain slices and brain tissue. A novel recording technique that will allow simultaneous electrical and chemical activity from brain as well as optical imaging is under development under a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. Finally, a new initiative has been undertaken to develop electronic interfaces to neurons and neural networks. The idea is to develop programmable neural networks so that the neurons can be patterned in a desirable fashion and with a programmed interface for recording and stimulation. A new technology has been proposed to genetically engineer the neurons and the neural network to achieve desirable gene activated function, such as synaptic control.

Leslie Tung (Biomedical Engineering and Whitaker Institute)

Photolithographic, micro-contact printing, and micro-abrasion techniques are employed to place predefined patterns of extracellular matrix proteins or topological features onto cover slips that serve to guide the growth and spread of cardiac cells in culture. Dr. Tung creates engineered monolayers of neonatal rat cardiac cells containing up to several hundred thousand cells, so that their integrated, functional electrophysiology can be studied using optical mapping techniques.

Andre Levchenko (Whitaker Institute and Biomedical Engineering)

Prof. Levchenko’s lab is interested in understanding the mechanisms of intracellular signal transduction and cell-cell communication. In particular, lab members are involved in building and experimentally validating the models of how bacterial cells interact (“quorum sensing”), how eukaryotic cells sense and respond to gradients and how a cell decides between survival and suicide. All these problems are addressed with currently established microfluidics based set-up utilizing microfabricated PDMS chips.

William Sharpe (Mechanical Engineering)

Prof. Sharpe measures the mechanical properties of materials used in MEMS. Tensile specimens as small as 1 micron thick and 50 microns wide can be tested using specialized techniques developed over the past several years. Stress-strain curves, high temperature behavior, and fatigue lifetimes can be measured.

Jeff Wang (Whitaker Institute and Mechanical Engineering)

Prof. Wang’s research interests include designs of micro/nano scale fluidic process and force fields for molecular manipulation, single molecule detection, and experimental molecular dynamics. His laboratory seeks to apply the technologies both for quick and ultra-sensitive identification of biosignatures and for high-resolution study of molecular interaction process.

Andreas G. Andreou
(Electrical and Computer Engineering and Whitaker Institute)

Prof. Andreou's research program examines the relationship between information, and its physical representation in both biological and in human engineered information processing systems. We study new ways of transforming and communicating information that exploit physical properties of the underlying technologies; from integrated circuit design principles that rely on the non-linear characteristics of CMOS devices, to optoelectronic microstructure architectures employing silicon on sapphire CMOS circuits, to micromechanical filters for acoustic processing. Our laboratory has also developed hybrid microsystems for bio-sensing and polarization imaging.

Education
Two courses are offered for students that are interested in working in the laboratory. The first is an advanced introductory course and it is a pre-requisite or co-requisite for the second course that is project oriented.

520/580.495 Microfabrication Laboratory
This laboratory course is an introduction to the principles of microfabrication for synthesizing structures employed in sensors, MEMS, and microsystems with applications in medicine and biology. Course comprises of laboratory work and accompanying lectures that cover silicon oxidation, aluminum evaporation, photoresist deposition, photolithography, plating, etching, packaging, design and analysis CAD tools, and foundry services. (Andreou)

520.773 Advanced Topics in Fabrication and Microengineering
Graduate level, project oriented course with topics from current literature on microsystem integration of complex functional units across different physical scales from nano to micro and macro. Projects topics in the areas of emerging fabrication technologies, micro-electromechanical systems, hybrid biological-silicon microsystems, nanolithography, nanotechnology, soft lithography, self-assembly, and soft materials. Discussion will include biological systems as models of integration and functional complexity. (Staff)