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Chao Wang

Micro & nano-fluidics

Previously, we have worked on design, fabrication, and characterization of nanofluidic chips to achieve sorting of subcellular biomolecules. While at IBM, Prof. Wang worked to fabricate and characterize nanoscale lateral displacement arrays (nanoDLD) devices that could separate and purify extracellular vesicles (EVs). This demonstrated EV sorting can potentially resolve one of the serious technical challenges in EV purification, which is conventionally labor-intensive and often bias-prone. Later, the nanoDLD platform was also demonstrated capable of performing continuous DNA separation that is much more accurate the conventional gels. Additionally, We studied extensively DNA biophysics and its hydrodynamic interactions with nanofluidic structures in a nanopillar array with heterogeneously arranged nanopillar arrays. Precise geometry engineering of suh nanofluidic devices have helped discover many intriguing fluidic dynamic phenomena. On the other hand, such nanofluidic devices serve to greatly improve the precision in molecular separation, imaging, and analysis.

Further read:

  1. Chao Wang *, Robert L. Bruce, Elizabeth A. Duch, Jyotica V. Patel, Joshua T. Smith, Yann Astier, Benjamin H Wunsch, Siddharth Meshram, Armand Galan, Chris Scerbo, Michael A. Pereira, Deqiang Wang, Evan G. Colgan, Qinghuang Lin, and Gustavo Stolovitzky*, “Hydrodynamics of Diamond-Shaped Gradient Nanopillar Arrays for Effective DNA Translocation into Nanochannels,” ACS Nano, vol 9, pp. 1206-1218, 2015.
  2. Benjamin H. Wunsch †*, Joshua T. Smith†*, Stacey M. Gifford, Chao Wang, Markus Brink, Robert Bruce, Robert H. Austin, Gustavo Stolovitzky*, and Yann Astier, “Nanoscale Lateral Displacement Arrays for Separation of Exosomes and Colloids Down to 20nm,” Nanotechnol., vol. 11, pp. 936–940, 2016.
  3. Chao Wang †*, Sung-Wook Nam †, John. M. Cotte, Christopher. V. Jahnes, Evan G. Colgan, Robert L. Bruce, Markus Brink, Michael F. Lofaro, Jyotica V. Patel, Lynne M. Gignac, Eric A. Joseph, Satyavolu Papa Rao, Gustavo Stolovitzky*, Stanislav Polonsky*, and Qinghuang Lin*, “Wafer-Scale Integration of Sacrificial Nanofluidic Chips for Single DNA Molecule Detection and Manipulation,” Nature Communications, 8, pp. 14243, 2017.
  4. Benjamin H. Wunsch, Sung-Cheol Kim, Stacey M. Gifford, Yann Astier, Chao Wang, Robert L. Bruce, Jyotica V. Patel, Elizabeth A. Duch, Simon Dawes, Gustavo Stolovitzky, and Joshua T. Smith, “Gel-on-a-chip: continuous, velocity-dependent DNA separation using nanoscale lateral displacement”, Lab on a Chip, 19, pp. 1567-1578, 2019.
  5. Binquan Luan*, Chao Wang, Ajay Royyuru, and Gustavo Stolovitzky, “Controlling the motion of DNA in a nanochannel with transversal alternating electric voltages,” Nanotechnology, vol 25, pp. 265101, 2014.

Ongoing and future research direction

In the next few years, we will co-design plasmonic and dielectric metasurface device and their nanomanufacturing for parallel, high-throughput imaging and molecular detection, integrate metasurface structures into microfluidic chips that can sequentially perform sample separation, detection, and readout.