About the Heath Lab
The Heath group works on a broad variety of projects.
One part of the group works in the area of solid-state quantum physics, materials science,
and basic surface science, with a slight focus on energy conversion applications.
The other part of the group works on fundamental biology and translational medicine -
with a clear focus on oncology. We are comprised of a diverse, talented, and highly
motivated group of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. Our graduate students
come from the physical, organic, and inorganic areas of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering,
and from Physics, the Caltech/UCLA joint M.D./Ph.D. program, Bioengineering, Biology, and
Electrical Engineering. Our postdoctoral researchers have similarly diverse backgrounds.
Furthermore, we collaborate extensively with groups at Caltech, groups within the UCLA medical
school, and groups in Seattle, Europe, Israel, and Singapore. Our labs occupy about 60% of the
basement level of the Noyes Laboratory of Chemical Physics, as well as a small laboratory at UCLA
devoted to translational medicine.
One thing that draws our research projects together is that we
focus on the fundamental scientific bottlenecks that, if solved, can provide keys toward solving much
larger problems. Those problems can be in energy conversion technologies, translational medicine, or
basic oncology studies.We believe in working hard, playing hard, and that our science should be fun.
Graduate students and postdocs who leave the group move into a variety of fields. The majority continue in academics; approximately 2 postdocs a year leave the group and take faculty positions within top ranked academic departments (chemistry, physics, engineering, etc.). About half of the graduate students take postdoctoral research positions, while the other half take industrial positions in everything from small start up companies to large corporations.
Biology
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Cancer Diagnostics using Microfluidic Devices
Habib Ahmad, Alex Sutherland, Jun Wang
Microfluidics-based assays of blood proteins offer numerous advantages over their
macroscale counterparts, including significantly lower reagent/analyte consumption and faster assay times.
To develop a microfluidic device that assays large panels of proteins. This device may be applied cancer diagnostic, as well as gaining mechanistic insight into diseases.
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Capture Agents
Kaycie Butler, Samir Das, Steve Milward, Arundhati Nag
The Capture Agent project aims to create artificial antibodies that share the high affinity of antibodies, but maintain the stability of short peptides.
We are currently exploring the use of branched peptides and bitmetallic-peptide complexes as capture agents, and targeting carbohydrates and phosphorylated protein regions.
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Single Cell Secretion Study
Kiwook Hwang, Young Shik Shin
Interactions between tumor cells and their microenvironments are essential to tumorgenesis. We are using DEAL technique along with microfluidics and DNA barcodes pattern to study protein secretion from cancer cells at the single-cell level.
Based on the new information from single cell protein profiling, the signaling network and cell-cell interactions between tumor cells can be elucidated.
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Tumor Hypoxia and Protein Regulation
Lidong Qin, Wei Wei
Tumor cell hypoxia is an innate environment factor encountered during the development of many types of human tumors. We use an on-chip cell handling and protein detecting method to determine the molecular network of such conditions and to decipher the regulation of key proteins involved in hypoxic conditions.
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Understanding Cellular Immunity against Cancer by Highly Multiplexed Approaches
Chao Ma
Immune cells are able to induce tumor elimination. Thus, our understanding of the dynamics of the major players in tumor immunity is critical for harnessing the immune system for cancer therapy.
We aim to develop and employ multiplexed, miniaturized, high-throughput approaches to aid in decoding the complexity of anti-tumor immunity at both molecular and cellular level.
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Materials
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Graphene Imaging
Peigen Cao, Joseph Varghese
Water coats most solid surfaces under ambient conditions. The
surface-adsorbed water adlayers, typically only a few molecules in
thickness, are extremely fragile, and their microscopic structures at room
temperature are particularly hard to interrogate. For example, scanning
probe microscopy (SPM), a widely-used set of surface characterization
techniques, is difficult to apply due to tip perturbations.
Recently, our
group has developed a new method, namely graphene-templated imaging, to
visualize the elusive water adlayers. We found that although it is only one atom
thick, graphene can be used to fix and protect the water adlayers, thus
permitting the imaging of their microscopic structures through SPM under
ambient conditions. This technique has also been generalized to other
systems, including the imaging of weakly-bound organic molecule adlayers
(e.g., THF and cyclohexane), biomolecules (e.g., DNA and proteins), and
various bio-entities/tissues (e.g., viruses).
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Nanostructured Thermoelectrics
Dr. Slobodan Mitrovic, Jen-Kan Yu
Thermoelectric materials convert heat energy into electricity and vice versa. The conversion efficiency is described by the dimensionless figure-of-merit ZT. The ZT values of commercial thermoelectrics are too low to be of practical value in large-scale energy harvesting.
Currently, we are exploring thermal conductivity within a novel superstructure - a periodic thin film nanomesh. The basic idea behind such structures is that coherent mechanisms for reducing thermal conductivity are not masked by interface scattering, since they are made of a single-crystal, continuous material.
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Silicon Nanowire FETs for Asynchronous Logic Application
Ruo-Gu Huang
Asynchronous circuits are relatively robust to stochastic variations in doping, device dimensions,
and other factors that happen to nanoelectronics. We explore the use of SiNW FETs made via superlattice
nanowire pattern transfer (SNAP) as asynchronous logic applications for the next generation of nanoelectronics.
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