John Rogers: Making optoelectronics less invasive in the body
New advances in materials have led to skin- and organ-mounted electronics for continuous monitoring, and ultraminiature LEDs that can be injected into the depth of the brain for use in optogenetics.
John A. Rogers obtained BA and BS degrees in chemistry and in physics from the University of Texas, Austin, in 1989. From MIT, he received SM degrees in physics and in chemistry in 1992 and the PhD degree in physical chemistry in 1995. From 1995 to 1997, Rogers was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard University Society of Fellows. During this time he also served as a founder and Director of Active Impulse Systems, a company that commercialized technologies developed during his PhD work. He joined Bell Laboratories as a Member of Technical Staff in the Condensed Matter Physics Research Department in 1997, and served as director of this department from the end of 2000 to 2002. He currently holds a Swanlund Chair, the highest chaired position at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign. He has a primary appointment in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, with joint appointments in the Departments of Chemistry, Bioengineering, Mechanical Science and Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering. He served as the Director of a Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center on nanomanufacturing, funded by the National Science Foundation, from 2009-2012. He is currently Director of the Seitz Materials Research Laboratory.
The Rogers Research Group seeks to understand and exploit interesting characteristics of 'soft' materials, such as polymers, liquid crystals, and biological tissues as well as hybrid combinations of them with unusual classes of micro/nanomaterials. Current research focuses on soft materials for conformal electronics, nanophotonic structures, microfluidic devices, and microelectromechanical systems, with an emphasis on bio-inspired and bio-integrated technologies. These efforts are highly multidisciplinary, and combine expertise from nearly every traditional field of technical study.
Rogers has contributed more than 30 papers to SPIE conferences and proceedings, and chairs the Bioinspired, Biointegrated, Bioengineered Photonic Devices conference at SPIE Photonics West, as well as serving on the program committee of the annual Photonics West conference on Advanced Fabrication Technologies for Micro/Nano Optics and Photonics.
