3D printing technology is buzzing throughout the scientific and engineering communities. It provides a micron-scale controllable additive manufacturing process whose potential applications are plentiful. Even so, 3D printed objects still lack any sort of electronic capabilities – a fundamental property in today’s high tech world. The goal of this project is to pave the way for 3D printing smart devices. Graphene, a one-atom thick carbon lattice, makes a great candidate for achieving this goal because of its excellent electrical and mechanical properties and its 2 dimensional structure. In addition to working with the group to build our own inkjet printing system, my focus is to optimize a process for printing graphene inks and apply it to embedding electronic sensors into 3D printed objects.

I began working as a UROP in the Palacios Group in Fall of 2013, and have worked on a project involving fabricating graphene-based FETS. I was responsible for mechanically exfoliating graphene flakes, and gained experience fabricating devices in the clean room and analyzing their performance. I have also interned at Cisco, where I was a member of the design verification team for industry scale routers.