The ability to controllably manipulate biological and synthetic nanoscopic species in liquids at the ultimate single object resolution, is important to many fields such as biology, medicine, physics, chemistry and nanoengineering. In this lecture I will present a novel concept of electrokinetic nanovalving, with which we are able to confine and guide single nano-objects in a liquid, solely based on spatiotemporal tailoring of the free energy landscape guiding the motion. I will demonstrate guiding, confining, releasing and sorting of biological nano-objects, exemplified by immunoglobulin G molecules and adenoviruses, but also a broad palette of other nano-objects such as lipid vesicles, quantum dots, dielectric and metallic particles, of various sizes and inherent charges, suspended in electrolytes with a wide range of ionic strengths, up to biological buffer solution levels. Such systems can enable single entity resolution investigation and handling of multiple entities in complex applications exemplified by chemical or biochemical synthesis and analysis in a continuous on-chip environment.

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Bio

Professor Dimos Poulikakos is the founding director of the Lab of Thermodynamics in Emerging Technologies at ETH Zurich. He served as the Vice President of Research of ETH Zurich in the period 2005-2007, as the ETH director of the IBM-ETH Binnig-Rohrer Nanotechnology center (2008-2011) and as the Head of the Mechanical and Process Engineering Department at ETH Zurich (2011- 2014). Among the awards and recognitions he has received for his contributions are the White House/NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, the Pi Tau Sigma Gold Medal of ASME, the Nusselt-Reynolds Prize, and the Max Jacob Award of ASME and AIChE. He was a Russell S. Springer Professor of the Mechanical Engineering Department of the University of California at Berkeley. He was presented with the Outstanding Engineering Alumnus Award of the University of Colorado in Boulder in 2012. He received the Dr.h.c. of the National Technical University of Athens in 2006. In 2008 he was elected to the Swiss National Academy of Engineering (SATW), where from 2012 to 2015 he also served as president of its science board.

Prof. Poulikakos’s research is in the area of interfacial transport phenomena, thermodynamics and related materials science with a broad range of emerging technologies and applications. The focus is on understanding the related physics, in particular at the micro- and nanoscales and employing this knowledge to the development of novel technologies.