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Professor Justus Ndukaife is with the department of electrical engineering and computer science at Vanderbilt University. He is also a faculty member of the Vanderbilt Institute of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (VINSE). Prior to joining Vanderbilt University, he received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Purdue University during which he was awarded the prestigious Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation Award for outstanding Ph.D. dissertation, an award given to the best doctoral candidate at Purdue University every year. He was recognized for his invention of a new kind of Lab-on-a-Chip device called Electrothermoplasmonic Tweezers for high resolution trapping of nanoscale objects. His other honors include the Purdue College of Engineering Outstanding Research Award, the NSBE Golden Torch Award, Best Paper Award at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) conference, election as co-chair of the 2018 Gordon Research Seminar on Plasmonics and Nanophotonics, and Induction into the Society of Innovators of Northwest, Indiana, USA. During the 2016 Gordon Research Conference on Plasmonics and Nanophotonics, he was selected to deliver the late-breaking talk and his presentation was entitled “Shaping the Future of Plasmon Nano-Optical Tweezing”. His research works have been published in the top peer-reviewed journals including Nature Nanotechnology, Science and ACS Nano. He received the bachelor of science degree from the University of Lagos, Nigeria with First Class honors in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Professor Ndukaife’s research is at the interface between the fields of nanophotonics (which involves the confinement and manipulation of light at the deeply subwavelength scale) and microfluidics, as well as on novel bio-inspired soft actuators and robots. Professor Ndukaife’s research interests include nano-optical trapping with plasmonic and resonant dielectric metasurfaces, programmable self-assembly of nanostructures for energy harvesting and on-chip light sources, discovery of novel emergent behavior in nanoscale motors, and nano-biosensors for water quality monitoring and point-of-care diagnostics. |
