The coming microstructure revolution

Hana Butler Gutiérrez likes tiny things, but she wants to make a big impact. For her MPhil in Micro- and Nanotechnology Enterprise she is looking to deepen her understanding of how micro- and nanostructures influence material performance, with a focus on scalable manufacturing techniques. She believes that microstructures have the potential to revolutionise industries by allowing the development of stronger, lighter and more efficient components.

Hana, who has led an innovative initiative at Brown University to promote women in Engineering, has been working with silicone lattices designed to go inside helmets and absorb the impact of blows to the head. She is collaborating with a bio lab that manufactures cortical spheroids or “mini-brains”, which are composed of thousands of neural cells. They are 200 microns in diameter (similar to the width of three human hairs) and are a good model of the human brain because they contain multiple neural cell types, like astrocytes, neurons and microglia, have capillary-like networks and have similar electrical activity to the brain. Her role is to create a specialised device that delivers precise impulses to the mini-brains using silicone micropillars which she manufactures using micro-moulding techniques. The device functions like a switch, quickly straining the mini-brains.

“The aim is to understand what happens when the brain experiences a traumatic injury,” she says. “I like working on a very small scale, and I want to learn more about how to manufacture tiny things. On the nanoscale, the laws of Physics change. I am doing this MPhil to better understand how it all works,” she adds.

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