Event
NANOCOLLOQUIUM: HOWARD KATZ
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
1:00 p.m.-2:00 p.m.
Kay Boardrooms, 1107 Jeong H. Kim Engineering Building
Martha Heil
301 405 0876
mjheil@umd.edu
http://www.nanocenter.umd.edu/events/
Organic Electronic Materials for Vapor and Biomolecule Sensing
Howard E. Katz
Professor of Materials Science and Engineering
Johns Hopkins University
Abstract: Organic and polymeric materials are enticing for use in electronic sensor technologies because the current or voltage responses can be designed into the chemistry of the materials and the sensing platforms can be made flexible and printable. The talk will describe two organic transistor-based architectures for chemical sensing with relevance to health and medicine. The first is to detect the small molecule ammonia in its vapor phase. For this purpose, we employ p- and n-type semiconductors where charge carrier energies and densities are tuned so that ammonia strongly quenches or dopes the p- and n-materials, respectively. Responses below 0.1 ppm volume/volume are detectable, the most sensitive electronic response to ammonia yet reported. The second is to detect nanomolar levels of a protein biomarker in aqueous solution. Although organic semiconductors are used for this application as well, the main materials design element is a top dielectric through which biomarker binding is electronically coupled to a semiconductor layer. The most sensitive response of an organic transistor to a protein was recorded using this coupling material, consisting of a blend of fluorinated polymer and molecular hydrocarbon. Amplifying circuits using these architectures will also be described.
Bio: Howard Katz is Chair and Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. His PhD was from UCLA in 1982, and he was at Bell Laboratories from 1982 to 2004, becoming a "Distinguished Member of Technical Staff". His research is in organic, hybrid, and interfacial electronics, publishing over 200 papers, with H-index above 60. His inventions have resulted in more than 40 patents. He is a fellow of
the American Chemical Society, the Materials Research Society, the American Physical Society and AAAS.
