Fundamental interactions the key to sensors

Omowunmi Sadik has discovered many things in life, perhaps none more important than the value of challenging traditional perspectives in order to find new solutions to old problems.

Currently, as the director for Binghamton's Center for Advanced Research and Environmental Systems (CASE), her groundbreaking research focuses on microelectrode biosensors that are able to detect even trace amounts of organic materials. The many applications for this technology include drug detection (in the place of drug-sniffing dogs) and bomb detection. She is also exploring a patent strategy for another technology that would provide an improved approach for recycling metal ions from industrial and environmental wastes.
Sensors have traditionally been developed by focusing on the specific substance or analyte they are meant to detect, without paying much attention to the mechanism or processes involved. Sadik instead studies the fundamental interactions between the sensor and the analyzed compounds.

CASE brings together a broad multidisciplinary team with a diverse set of skills in sensors, sensor systems and environmental technologies. Developing today's sensors for biomedical, security and environmental applications requires a multidisciplinary approach. In the last two decades, advances in materials science, bioelectronics, biotechnology and engineering have remarkably influenced the design of analytical sensors and biosensor devices. Recent progress in sensor technologies involves interdisciplinary studies that include physics, chemistry biology, biochemistry, materials science, nanotechnology and computer science. Due to the need for faster, cheaper and easier-to-use methods, biochemical sensors have emerged as a dynamic technique for qualitative and quantitative determination of different analyses that are important to many areas of environmental, clinical, agricultural, food or military investigations.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Omowunmi Sadik
• sensors
• biosensors
• Binghamton
• nanotechnology
• CASE