Dr Monfared Seminar
Thursday, February 16th, 2023 at 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm
- In-person event
Abstract (research):
The current approach for data acquisition in both environmental and biological sciences is based on sending highly qualified crew (graduate students, researchers or technicians) repeatedly to the field or laboratory to collect “data”. In most cases, this method will not scale very well due to associated costs, energy, and time needed to perform these measurements. As such, governments, industries, and scientists now acknowledge the need for new data acquisition and sensing technologies to enable real-time, continuous, and in-situ monitoring of variations in chemical, physical and biological properties of marine environments (environmental sciences) and cell metabolism (biological sciences). The adoption of the novel nano-biosensors, particularly plasmonic fiber-optic sensors based on cost-effective nanomaterials, could minimize the cost and maximize the detection limit for real-time and in situ biosensing. This development would be transformative for medical applications (drug discovery and cancer studies), environmental monitoring, agricultural sciences and the related industrial sectors as it would allow us to deploy monitoring devices in a quasi-distributed manner (via fiber-optics) in broader range of freshwater/marine environments (or various cell/tumor microenvironments) to record data at high resolution in both space and time.
Bio:
Yashar Monfared has been working as a researcher, teacher, and consultant in the electrical, optical, and environmental engineering sectors for nearly a decade. He obtained his PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Dalhousie University with an emphasis on linear and nonlinear light effects in optical fibers. He also worked on plasmonic nanomaterials and nanostructures and their applications in spectroscopy, photothermal therapy, sensing, and water desalination in his post-doctoral appointments at Dalhousie University (Physics, Chemistry, and Biomedical Engineering Departments) and Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. He has published more than 40 peer-reviewed research articles in top-tier Science and Engineering journals and conferences, and received various scholarships, grants and awards including Isaak Wilton Killam Pre-Doctoral Graduate Scholarship, President award of Dalhousie University, Ocean Frontier Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship, and Invest Nova Scotia Seed grant. His current research utilizes an interdisciplinary combination of theory, numerical simulations, and experimental techniques to design, develop, and deploy novel plasmonic fiber-optic sensors for monitoring freshwater and marine environments, and track variations in cell culture and tumor microenvironments.