Professor Jonathan G. Shackman's Research Interests

Recent developments in microfabrication technologies have opened up many possible avenues for revolutionary research in a wide range of fields and have found wide spread application in the chemical and biological sciences.   Miniaturization strategies frequently seek to encapsulate all processes of analysis, including sample preparation, separations, detection, and data analysis.   Capillary electrophoresis (CE) is a powerful analytical tool that is commonly utilized in these microfluidic devices to perform the separation of analytes.   While affording rapid, high resolution separations with small sample requirements, CE suffers from low concentration limits of detection (LOD) when using the most common optical detection techniques ( i.e. , absorbance and fluorescence).   The detection problem has been exacerbated when translated from fused silica capillaries to microdevices, which frequently employ thick borosilicate glass or polymeric materials, as well as extremely small channel dimensions, that further degrade LOD.   While alternative detection strategies and microcolumn geometries have been employed to improve LOD, sample enrichment methods, both preconcentration and in-line concentration, have also been very successfully utilized to bring analytes up to the detection limits of the common detectors using standard capillary instruments.