maboudianlab - Elizabeth Parker

Alumnus - Master

M.S. in Chemical Engineering, University of California at Berkeley, 2004

B.S. in Chemical Engineering, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, 1998

Current Position:

Senior Engineer, Honeywell FM&T

Research:

The focus of my research is self-assembled monolayer coatings and their behavior in fluids. I have just finished my master’s thesis titled: Microelectromechanical (MEMS) Tribology in Microfluidic Environments. It contained two main thrusts: adhesion of cantilever beams (with different surface treatments) in various fluids, and characterization of SAM coatings in fluids. Knowledge of surface treatment behavior in fluids may be very useful in BioMEMS and microfluidic MEMS applications. Because fluid behavior is different on the micro-scale than what is normally encountered in your kitchen pipes, capillaries of micro-devices are usually coated with a hydrophobic coating to keep fluids in the capillary. In this way, you can pump the quantities of fluid as slugs to the rest of your device. In other applications, fluids are used to separate DNA, and different coatings are used as binding sites for DNA fragments. Although my work did not directly involve microfluidic devices per se, it does provide incite on the behavior of the coatings in different fluids that may be useful for these kinds of devices. One of the most interesting facets of my research was to discover that longtime exposure to fluid environments changes the properties of the coating.

One other minor project that I worked on was the characterization of a plasma-generated polymer coating, and its comparison to SAM coating behavior in air.

I have now returned to Honeywell FM&T in Kansas City, which sent me to UC-Berkeley as part of their Technical Fellowship program. I am a process engineer there, and my assignment is to get our MEMS back-end of line processing up and running.