Yazicigil and students take honors at IEEE conference
Assistant Professor Rabia Yazicigil (ECE, BME) and her team drew notice and garnered several awards at this year’s IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), nicknamed the “Chip Olympics,” in San Francisco.
Yazicigil’s former doctoral student drew Qijun Liu (ENG’23) was named a “Rising Star” by the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS) at the IEEE ISSCC 2024. Liu, Yazicigil, and collaborators presented a paper and a live hardware demonstration of a high-throughput droplet microfluidic device embedded with custom CMOS sensors for luminescence sensing and impedance spectroscopy. Their demo was highlighted in conference promotional materials.
“I’m amazed by her capacity to break down barriers for system-level innovation through collaboration with researchers from various disciplines and her excellent teamwork skills,” Yazicigil says of Liu. “Her adaptability in transitioning between research areas, spanning from microelectronics to synthetic biology, showcases her interdisciplinary mindset.”
Yazicigil has been busy establishing a new field called cyber-secure biological systems. Notably, her team has collaborated with MIT researchers on a tiny, safe-to-swallow capsule that monitors gut health, detecting early signs of irritable bowel disease flare-ups and transmitting the data wirelessly and using very little power.
Developing that capsule required a combination of skills and disciplines that Yazicigil, Liu, and BU collaborators are also using to build living sensors to monitor wastewater for disease markers or monitor drinking water supply for contaminants. The sensors might also be used for soil monitoring, sustainable biomanufacturing, and other applications.
“Traditionally, wastewater monitoring is done by manual and mechanical sample collection, quantification of the signals using large equipment in the lab—it can take eight days while having limited scalability and high cost” says Yazicigil. “What we are proposing is a real-time wireless biosensor network that has genetically engineered biosensors housed within microfluidics. Those living sensors, combined with custom electronics, are wirelessly communicating within the wastewater to do low-cost, fast analysis.”
Although not a co-author of that paper, yet another one of Yazicigil’s doctoral students, Zeynep Ece Kizilates, was also selected as one of the IEEE SSCS Rising Stars this year at ISSCC.
In addition, Yazicigil’s team received the 2023 Best Poster Award for their hybrid microfluidic-bioelectronic system demonstration last year. (The 2023 award was presented at the 2024 conference.)
The team also includes Professor Doug Densmore (ECE, BME, MSE) and BME doctoral student Diana Arguijo Mendoza, among others.
Work on the hybrid microfluidic-bioelectronic systems published at the IEEE ISSCC was supported by the NSF SemiSynBio-II program, NIH, Catalyst Foundation, and Department of Defense. The wastewater monitoring work is supported by the Semiconductor Research Corporation and the Catalyst Foundation.