Profile

My work is mostly based on a micro-fabrication facility, called a “clean room”. A clean room is an environment used in manufacturing research with a low level of environmental pollutants such as dust, microbes, aerosol particles and chemical vapours.  Every person that enters a clean room needs to wear protective clothing such as hoods, face masks, gloves, boots, and coveralls. In the clean room I can build structures which are smaller than the width of a hair (< 10 μm). After building these so-called “devices”, I take them to our bio-labs to test them. In the bio-labs I use these devices in several chemical and biological applications; for example some devices serve as scaffolds to grow cells on. Some other devices are used to produce tiny water droplets that carry a specific drug inside. At a later stage, these tiny droplets will be inserted in the human body and travel all the way through the body to find the site of pain or infection and will release the drug only at the site.

In a typical day, I would wear my clean room suite and work in the lab for about 4-5 hours. I have to clean my materials  and then process the materials in order to build tiny structures. For example I place a silicon wafer into a chamber that has oxygen and plasma to create chemical bonds on its surface. Moreover, I place the silicon wafer into another chamber, where I deposit a thin layer of metal on top, such as gold, platinum, aluminium, chromium and many more.  Finally, after building the structures, I view them under the microscope. I normally have lunch with my friends and colleagues around 1 o’clock and sometimes a coffee break around 4 o’clock. I prefer to finish my day with some office work, which usually involves email correspondence, data analysis, computer-aided (CAD) design, etc. I leave the university around 18.30-19.00 depending on the work load.