Dr. Bonnie Gray and her team of graduate students at the School of Engineering Science, Simon Fraser University, are developing new microfluidic technologies and collaborating with engineers, physicists, chemists, and biologists to develop biomedical microdevices for cell research, disease detection, and drug delivery.

“Centralized access to design tools, foundry services, and test equipment helps to facilitate the interdisciplinary collaborations essential to my research, as well as attract graduate students to my lab and in effect, to Canada. Having studied in the United States, I am familiar with that country’s research infrastructure and it is much more difficult to find and gain access to such a wide range of resources. CMC’s program allows me to easily take advantage of tools and technologies that complement what I already have in my lab.”

Dr. Bonnie Gray
Assistant Professor/Senior Supervisor
School of Engineering Science
Simon Fraser University

Dr. Bonnie Gray (fourth from the left), and her team of graduate students are using CMC-supported products and services to complement existing capabilities at the Simon Fraser University microfabrication facility.

Dr. Bonnie Gray’s current collaborations are focused on applications that include a flexible polymer glucose sensor, which will allow diabetics to monitor their glucose levels via wearable sensors; microscopic passages to grow and analyze endothelial cells that line the inner walls of blood vessels and play a major role in causing hardening of the arteries; and--most recently--sensors to monitor antibodies produced by single cells, which will help develop methods for treating serious diseases.
In addition to developing applications that will ultimately help improve the health of Canadians, Dr. Gray and her team are giving research a boost by finding practical process solutions that help to interconnect and assemble miniaturized microfluidic devices and systems. These technologies provide the backbone for all of Dr. Gray’s other projects and collaborations by giving her lab the capability to assemble their sensors and other microfluidic components into larger systems.

Her research at the Simon Fraser University microfabrication facility takes a reusable, modular approach, where components can be fabricated separately and later joined to form microinstruments: “When I fabricate interconnect structures in-house, I try to make them compatible with devices that are fabricated in CMC-supported processes, especially in technology areas where I don’t have the expertise or required equipment, or where I think other researchers may need modular interconnect.”

Dr. Gray describes another example of how complementary technologies are used at her lab: “We plan to use the CMC-supported microfluidics platform to validate early design concepts before we fabricate them in-house. The platform has electrical and fluidic attachments and very nicely combines several test set-ups into one. It really brings it all together so we can more easily validate our designs.”

Dr. Gray also credits CMC for its role in helping to accelerate the development of the facility’s skilled researchers: “New graduate students are not immediately ‘qualified’ to use our lab. Access to the multi-user fabrication processes provided by CMC’s suppliers including Micralyne, and design and simulation tools provided by Cadence and ANSYS, help ramp up new graduate students so they can get started more quickly with developing new processes and novel ideas for my lab.”