New Experiences

Hello all,

My name is Chris Williamson and I'm from Western KY, Union County to be exact. I accepted this fellowship position with little to no background information about the field of nanotechnology or micro-sensors. When I received the description of my lab, I was even more clueless as to what I would be researching during my tenure. We are now into the 3rd week, and I believe I have it figured out; however, I have been seemingly unable to truly describe what I'm doing to anyone other than my supervisor, or the other students with whom I have collaborated. My hope is that will change by the end of this week, preparing me for our presentations next week.

Essentially my goal for this one month period is to test the durability and reliability of simple circuit structures on a silicon gel or PDMS substrate. The idea, as I found reading various articles pertaining to micro-sensors, is to ultimately create a patch that will allow doctors to check vitals, physical therapists to track the progression of a muscle, or you to just keep up with your heart rate while exercising, by simply attaching a patch, full of these micro circuits, and that this patch will send all this information to whomever requires it, over a wireless. It sounds like a great plan and would help to revolutionize being sick, or injured, or just curious. It would allow us to live our lives, and not be cooped up in a hospital attached to 10 different machines, and countless tubes.

This week, I really hope to actually transcend the design phase and enter the building and testing phase of some of these. My thoughts are that the more bends and turns in the circuit, the more durable and reliable it will be, simply because it will have just a little more "give" than something that is straight. Here goes nothing!

Hope everyone is working diligently and successfully towards their end goal.

-- Chris