Rajagopal places first at MRL Fall Conference

11/30/2017

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Manjunath Rajagopal
Manjunath Rajagopal
MechSE PhD candidate Manjunath Rajagopal earned first place in the presentation competition at the 2017 MRL Fall Conference, an annual two-day event held in November at the university’s Frederick Seitz Materials Research Lab.

The competition included a poster and presentation on a biological or materials project, and the featured work must have been conducted at MRL. Rajagopal’s presentation was titled, “Microscale probe for intracellular thermometry.” Measuring temperatures within a biological cell requires a microscale sensor that is electrically and chemically inert to the cell’s environment and thermally isolated from its surroundings.

“We employ the techniques of silicon-based microelectromechanical systems for fabricating a novel microscale probe. We make intracellular thermometry feasible by having just a micron thick silicon nitride supported probes with a 5 micron tip that has an accuracy of 54 mK,” said Rajagopal. “Working with Dr. Jeffrey Brown and Professor Rhanor Gillette at the School of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Illinois, we measured intracellular temperature changes in Aplysia slug’s neuron for various electrical and chemical stimuli.”

Rajagopal received his B.Tech and M.Tech (dual degree) from the Department of Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 2015. At IIT, he worked on modeling viscoelastic liquids using computational fluid dynamics for tribology studies.

He is currently working with Associate Professor Sanjiv Sinha. His research is on the characterization of 2D thermoelectric materials, and intracellular measurements using micro-and nano-fabricated devices.


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This story was published November 30, 2017.