Video: Michael McAlpine on piezoelectric power generation for implantable devices

The development of a method for integrating highly efficient energy conversion materials onto stretchable and biocompatible substrates could yield breakthroughs in implantable biomechanical energy harvesting systems. Piezoelectric nanomaterials represent a particularly interesting class of smart materials due to their highly efficient electromechanical coupling. The McAlpine Research Group at Princeton University has developed new methods for the synthesis and fabrication of piezoelectric nanomaterials, their integration onto alternative substrates such as stretchable elastomers, and fundamental investigations into enhanced piezoelectric responses under conditions induced by strain and confinement.

Michael McAlpine began his appointment as Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Princeton in 2008 and is an associated faculty member with the Princeton Department of Chemistry and the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials (PRISM). He received a B.S. in Chemistry with honors from Brown University in 2000 and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Harvard University in 2006. His research has focused on nanotechnology-enabled approaches to hybridize high-performance inorganic materials with flexible organics, for fundamental investigations in the biomedical and energy sciences. He has received a number of awards, most prominently a TR35 Young Innovator Award (2010), an Air Force Young Investigator Award (2008), an Intelligence Community Young Investigator Award (2008), a DuPont Young Investigator Award (2010), and an American Asthma Foundation Early Excellence Award (2009).

He gave an invited presentation on "Nanotechnology-enabled flexible energy harvesting," at SPIE Defense, Security and Sensing (April 2011).