Organic bioelectronic devices operation in in-vitro or in-vivo systems results in direct interface of the electronic active materials with the biological milieu. In order to effectively translate or stimulate biological events, many devices rely on mixed ionic and electronic transport. Due to the coupled nature of electronic and ionic conduction in organic materials, complex transport phenomena take place including electrostatic and faradaic processes. This symposium aims at bringing together researchers working on fundamental aspects of organic bioelectronic devices. The symposium focuses on gaining insight on device physics and how complex biological phenomena can be translated or stimulated via electronics. Better understanding of fundamental aspects of bioelectronic devices will lead to next generation devices with increased performance and capabilities.
- Organic transistors and electrodes for sensing and stimulation
- Drug delivery devices
- Photo stimulation devices
- Biochemical sensors
- Wearable devices
- Biotic/abiotic interface
Eleni Stavrinidou is an Associate Professor and leader of the Electronic Plants group at Linköping University. She received a PhD in Microelectronics from EMSE (France) in 2014. She then did her postdoctoral training at Linköping University (Sweden) during which she was awarded a Marie Curie fellowship. In 2017 Eleni Stavrinidou became Assistant Professor in Organic Electronics at Linköping University and established the Electronic Plants group. She received several grants including a Swedish Research Council Starting Grant and she is the Coordinator of the HyPhOE-FET-OPEN project. In 2019 she received the L’ORÉAL-UNESCO For Women in Science prize in Sweden. In 2020 she became Associate Professor and Docent in Applied Physics. The same year she was awarded the Future Research Leaders grant of the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research. Her research interests focus on organic electronics for plant monitoring and optimization, energy applications and bio-hybrid systems.
Annalisa Bonfiglio graduated in Physics in 1991 at the University of Genova, Italy and got the PhD in Bioengineering in 1996 at the Politechnical School in Milan.
She is currently Full Professor of Electronic Bioengineering at the Scuola Universitaria Superiore IUSS in Pavia, Italy.
She authored more than 200 papers on international journals, conference proceedings, book chapters. She also holds 12 patents. Her research activity is focussed on innovative materials (in particular organic semiconductors) and devices for wearable electronics and biomonitoring.
From 1996 to 2023 she was with the University of Cagliari where, from 2015 to 2017 she served as Vice-Rector for Innovation and Territorial Strategies. From 2014 to 2017 she was in the Board of Directors of CRS4 (Center for Advanced Studies, Research and Development in Sardinia). From 2017 to 2020, she served as President at CRS4.
Magnus Berggren received his MSc in Physics in 1991 and graduated as PhD (Thesis: Organic Light Emitting Diodes) in Applied Physics in 1996, both degrees from Linköping University. He then joined Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ in the USA, for a one-year post doc period focusing on the development of organic lasers and novel optical resonator structures.
In 1997 he teamed up with Opticom ASA, from Norway, and former colleagues of Linköping University to establish the company Thin Film Electronics AB (ThinFilm). From 1997 to 1999 he served Thin Film as its founding managing director and initiated the development of printed electronic memories based on ferroelectric polymers.
After this, he returned to Linköping University and also to a part time manager at RISE Acreo. In 1999, he initiated the research and development of paper electronics, in part supported by several paper- and packaging companies. Since 2002, he is the professor in Organic Electronics at Linköping University and the director of the Laboratory of Organic Electronics, today including close to 90 researchers.
Magnus Berggren is one of the pioneers of the Organic Bioelectronics and Electronic Plants research areas and currently he is the acting director of the Strategic Research Area (SFO) of Advanced Functional Materials (AFM) at LiU. In 2012 Magnus Berggren was elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and in 2014 he received the Marcus Wallenberg Price. He is also the co-founder of 7 companies: ThinFilm, Invisense, DP Patterning, Consensum Prodcution, OBOE IPR, OBOE Players and Ligna Energy.
Susan Daniel is the Fred H. Rhodes Professor of Chemical Engineering and the William C. Hooey Director of the Robert Frederick Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University. Her research team strives to understand phenomena at biological interfaces and chemically patterned surfaces that interact with soft matter – liquids; polymers; and biological materials, like cells, viruses, proteins, and lipids. Her team pioneered “biomembrane chips” to conduct cell-free, biophysical studies of mammalian, bacterial, and plant cell membranes, and recently merged this technology with organic electronic devices for expanded sensing capabilities.
Jennifer GelinasDion Khodagholy is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Columbia University in New York City.
He received his Master’s degree from the University of Birmingham (UK) in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering. This was followed by a second Master’s degree in Microelectronics at the Ecole des Mines. He attained his PhD in Microelectronics at the Department of Bioelectronics (BEL) of the Ecole des Mines (France). His postdoctoral research at New York University, Langone Medical Center was focused on large-scale cortical acquisition and analysis.
His research explores the interface of electronics and the brain in the context of both applied and discovery sciences, with the ultimate goal of new innovations in device engineering and neuroscience methods to improve diagnosis and treatment of neuropsychiatric disease.
Thuc-Quyen Nguyen is a professor in the Center for Polymers and Organic Solids and the Chemistry & Biochemistry Department at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She received her Ph.D. degree in physical chemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2001 under the supervision of Professor Benjamin Schwartz. Her thesis focused on photophysics of conducting polymers. She was a research associate in the Department of Chemistry and the Nanocenter at Columbia University working with Professors Louis Brus and Colin Nuckolls on molecular self-assembly, nanoscale characterization and molecular electronics. She also spent time at IBM Research Center at T. J. Watson (Yorktown Heights, NY) working with Richard Martel and Phaedon Avouris. Her current research interests are structure-function-property relationships in organic semiconductors, sustainable semiconductors, doping in organic semiconductors, interfaces in optoelectronic devices, bioelectronics, and device physics of OPVs, photodetectors, and electrochemical transistors. Recognition for her research includes 2005 Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, 2006 NSF CAREER Award, 2007 Harold Plous Award, 2008 Camille Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award, the 2009 Alfred Sloan Research Fellows, 2010 National Science Foundation American Competitiveness and Innovation Fellows, 2015 Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Award, 2016 Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, 2015-2019 World’s Most InfluentialScientific Minds; Top 1% Highly Cited Researchers in Materials Science by Thomson Reuters and Clarivate Analytics, 2019 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 2023 Wilhelm Exner Medal from Austria, 2023 Fellow of the US National Academy of Inventors, 2023 de Gennes Prize in Materials Chemistry from the Royal Society of Chemistry, 2023 Elected Member of the US National Academy of Engineering, 2024 Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences, and 2025 ACS Henry H. Storch Award in Energy Chemistry.
Alberto Salleo is currently an Associate Professor of Materials Science at Stanford University. Alberto Salleo graduated as a Fulbright Fellow with a PhD in Materials Science from UC Berkeley in 2001 working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on laser-induced optical breakdown in fused silica. From 2001 to 2005 Salleo was first post-doctoral research fellow and successively member of research staff at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, where he worked with Bob Street on device and materials physics of disordered and polymeric semiconductors. In 2005 Salleo joined the Materials Science and Engineering Department at Stanford as an Assistant Professor. While at Stanford, Salleo won the NSF Career Award, the 3M Untenured Faculty Award, the SPIE Early Career Award and the Tau Beta Pi Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award. Salleo is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Electronic Materials and a Principal Editor of MRS Communications.
Achilleas Savva is an Assistant Professor in the Bioelectronics group at Delft University of Technology, in The Netherlands. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in chemical engineering from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, in 2010. He then obtained his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from Cyprus University of Technology in 2014. His PhD research was focused on organic optoelectronics for renewable energy. In 2017 he joined the group of Professor Sahika Inal in KAUST, Saudi Arabia, as a postdoc, and expanded his research on organic bioelectronics. In 2019, he joined the group of Professor Róisín Owens at the University of Cambridge where he secured the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship. He developed several novel organic bioelectronic devices such as biosensors, light sensitive devices for photo-stimulation of neurons, 3D in vitro human stem cell models, among others. Achilleas was born in Limassol, Cyprus.
Luisa Torsi received her Laurea degree in Physics from the University of Bari in 1989 and a Ph.D. in Chemical Sciences from the same institution in 1993. She was a post-doctoral fellow at Bell Labs from 1994 to 1996. In 2005 and 2006 she was invited professor at the University of Anger and Paris 7, respectively. Since 2005 she is a full professor of chemistry at the University of Bari and since 2017 she is an adjunct professor at the Abo Academy University in Finland.
In 2010 she has been awarded the Heinrich Emanuel Merck prize for analytical sciences, this marking the first time the award is given to a woman. Prof. Luisa Torsi is also the winner of the Wilhelm Exner Medal 2021 (https://www.wilhelmexner.org/en/). The medal has been awarded since 1921 by the Austrian Association of Industries to celebrate excellence in research and science and as many as 23 Nobel prize winners have been awarded too. She is also the recipient, at the British Library in London, of the 2015 main overall platinum prize of the Global-Women Inventors and Innovators Network. The IUPAC - International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry awarded her with the 2019 Distinguished Women in Chemistry or Chemical Engineering. The analytical chemistry division of the European Chemical Society (EuChemS) conferred her the Robert Kellner Lecturer 2019.
Since 2020 she has been appointed National Representative for the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action of Horizon Europe by the Italian Minister for Education and Research. She is also past president of the European Material Research Society being the first women to serve on this role. She has been also elected 2017 Fellow of the Material Research Society, for pioneering work in the field of organic (bio) electronic sensors and their use for point-of-care testing.
Awarded research funding for over 26 million € in thirteen years, comprises several European contracts as well as national and regional projects. She is coordinating the “Single molecule bio-electronic smart system array for clinical testing – SiMBiT” a H2020-ICT-2018-2020 research and innovation action financed with over 3 M€. The PRIN 17 national project “ACTUAL: At the forefront of Analytical ChemisTry: disrUptive detection technoLogies to improve food safety (2017RHX2E4)” is also coordinated by Torsi. She has also coordinated a “European Industrial Doctorate” Marie Curie project in collaboration with Merck and was principal investigator in a Marie Curie ITN. She has also coordinated a Marie Curie ITN European network, several national PRIN projects, and was principal investigator in an ICT STREP proposal. She has also been the scientific coordinator of a Structural Reinforcement PON Project awarded to UNIBA for 2012-2014 and is engaged with a number of other Structural Reinforcement PON projects.
Torsi has authored almost 230 ISI papers, including papers published in Science, Nature Materials, Nature Communications, PNAS, Advanced Materials, Scientific Reports, and is co-inventor of several international awarded patents. Her works gathered almost 13.500 Google scholar citations resulting in an h-index of 55. She has given more than 170 invited lectures, including almost 50 plenary and keynotes contributions to international conferences.
Prof. Torsi is committed to the role of model for younger women scientists. She has been giving a number of talks on this topic such as a TEDx talk. Prof. Torsi is one of the 100Experts (https://100esperte.it) a project led by Fondazione Bracco comprising an online databank with the names and CVs of female experts in STEM, a sector historically underrepresented by women but a strategic one for the economic and social development of Italy. In a recent campaign to foster the idea of gender equality in Science among children, prof. Torsi was featured in a story of TOPOLINO (Italian comic digest-size series of Disney comics), as “Louise Torduck”, a successful female scientist of the Calisota valley.