A team of Penn Engineering students has been selected as one of five teams worldwide to receive an IEEE Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics and Frequency Control Society (UFFC-S) micro-grant to develop a new acoustic technology that could make it easier to build complex tissue models for biomedical research.

The interdisciplinary team, working in the laboratory of Shujie Yang, Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM), is developing a piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducer (PMUT)-based acoustic tweezer, a device that uses sound waves instead of physical contact to precisely move and arrange cells into programmable patterns.

The award is part of the international Lab-in-Fab PMUT Application Student Competition, organized by A*STAR Institute of Microelectronics, STMicroelectronics and the IEEE UFFC-S. In addition to receiving up to $2,000 in funding, the finalists were provided with custom PMUT chips and printed circuit boards fabricated at A*STAR’s 200 mm pilot manufacturing facility.

“Our long-term goal is to enable more controllable and gentle biofabrication of multilayer cellular structures,” says Huaiyu Zuo, a doctoral student in MEAM. “By using acoustic fields, we can manipulate cells into designed patterns while monitoring the assembly process in real time.”

Read more at Penn Engineering Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics.