Enabling Integrated Photonic Sensing Microfluidic Platform for In Situ Detection of Biomolecules and Bio-species

General information:
Place of work: Optical Sensors and Smart Integrated Systems group, LAAS-CNRS at ENSEEIHT-Toulouse INP site
Supervisors: Han Cheng Seat and Olivier Bernal
Contact: H. C. Seat (email: hcseat@laas.fr)
Type of contract: 3-year full-time MESRI PhD scholarship
PhD start date (preferred): October or November 2023
Salary: ~2044€ gross per month

Keywords: integrated photonics, optoelectronics, flexible micro-nano sensors, long period gratings, in situ refractive index measurements, biomolecule detection, super viruses, micro-fluidics, wastewater

Description of PhD research project
Context: The recent sanitary crisis has clearly demonstrated that one of today’s greatest societal challenges lies in countering unexpected biological threats such as the outbreak of super viruses or diseases on a global scale in order to guarantee a pathway to safeguard population health. While preempting or fully anticipating such threats is technically almost impossible, the containment and slowing of the spread of these super viruses, as experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic, can potentially be implemented through a multi-prong approach involving health strategies and, in particular, highly adaptable advanced technology platforms that can be rapidly oriented toward their detection and diagnostic. This would, in turn, grant specialists and medical experts sufficient time to elaborate solutions (antidote, vaccine development combined with isolation and containment policies) to optimally control and counter such threats.

Recent studies have shown that pathogenic viruses such as the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (better known as Covid-19) can be released from infected patients through human dejection into wastewater or sewage systems [1,2]. Substantial evidence from these reports also implies that the SARS-CoV-2 RNA (ribonucleic acid) strain entering the sewage pipe network is at its highest concentration at the system’s influent before rapidly decaying along its transport path to the effluent at treatment plants [2]. This suggests that analyzing wastewater from sewage could provide an efficient pathway to detecting the presence of the virus, whereupon further analysis of the concentration of the virus RNA, particularly in built-up dense population habitations, can potentially allow more accurate vectoring of the origins of the contaminated discharge. In this way, the infected population can potentially be better located, contained and isolated from healthy population zones while simultaneously allowing the appropriate authorities to more efficiently focus its effort (food supplies, medical care, etc) on the infected population. Implementing such a scheme will thus require a large network of sensors to be deployed en masse to operate in such hostile environment to sample the wastewater analytes in real time and transmit the correct information.

Details for the PhD Position (PDF download): https://media.licdn.com/dms/document/C4E1FAQGjUszDnnQrNg/feedshare-document-pdf-analyzed/0/1678195573736?e=1679529600&v=beta&t=gyId7xj_NZ6RsKJbpUq3AYFDISYHQmwL6PhdyQ1b1fY