Van den Bergveldlecture by prof. Aleksandra Radenovic (September 29, 3.30 pm, room RA 1501)

Every year the BIOS/Lab on a Chip group at the University of Twente in The Netherlands invites a guest speaker for the 'van den Bergveld' lecture. This lecture was instituted in honor of prof. Piet Bergveld and prof. Albert van den Berg, both retired. The speaker is chosen by members of the BIOS group through nomination and election, and this year we chose prof. Aleksandra Radenovic

The lecture will be held at September 29^th, 3.30 pm, room RA 1501

 Abstract lecture:

Nanofluidics

Laboratory of Nanoscale Biology, Institute of Bioengineering, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland.

Over the past two decades, nanofluidics — the study and manipulation of fluids at the nanoscale — has grown from the first nanopores drilled in silicon nitride into a broad field spanning single-molecule sensing, membranes for desalination and osmotic energy harvesting, and, most recently, brain-inspired ionic computing. Driven by advances in nanomaterials and nanofabrication, confinement and interfacial effects give rise to phenomena with no bulk counterpart, from ultra-fast liquid flow to anomalous and memristive ion transport. Yet as the field matures, it faces a defining challenge: measurements typically rely on electrical readout alone, on small numbers of fragile devices, which makes mechanisms difficult to pin down and results hard to reproduce. Nanofluidics is therefore entering a second phase, in which transparency, reproducibility and scalability matter as much as the discovery of new effects.

In this lecture, I will first give a broad overview of these trends, before turning to how operando microscopy is beginning to transform the field. By coupling high-speed, single-molecule-sensitive imaging with electrical, mechanical and optical probes, we can now watch directly how ions, biomolecules and even quantum emitters behave inside nanofluidic devices. Visualizing transport and structural transitions as they happen has revealed unexpected mechanisms — electromechanical blistering in 2D channels, lumen-charge-controlled gating in protein pores, and liquid-activated emission in hexagonal boron nitride — that underpin a new generation of robust sensors and ionic memristors. Together, these advances are turning nanofluidics from a “black box” discipline into a design-driven science, opening the way to reproducible device architectures, scalable iontronic circuits and entirely new modes of quantum and molecular sensing.

Biography:

Prof. Aleksandra Radenovic is a full professor of biological engineering at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and head of the Laboratory of Nanoscale Biology.

Her lab works in the research field that can be termed single-molecule biophysics. She has received her Ph.D. in Biophysics from the University of Lausanne (Switzerland.) in 2003 and a Msc. in Physics from the University of Zagreb (Croatia) in 2000. In 2010. she received a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant in 2010 and SNF Backup scheme Consolidator Grant (2015). She is also the recipient of the CCMX materials challenge award in 2016 and the Advanced ERC (2020) grant.

She develops techniques and methodologies based on optical imaging, bio-sensing and single-molecule manipulation with the aim to monitor the behavior of individual biological molecules and complexes in vitro and in live cells.