Dr. Yuanjing Lin

Post-doctoral Fellow

University of California, Berkeley

Dr. Yuanjing Lin received her bachelor’s degree from Department of Electronic Science and Technology, Nankai University, with the Outstanding Graduate Award in 2014. As an awardee of the prestigious Hong Kong Ph.D. Fellowship Scheme in the same year, she joined Prof. Zhiyong Fan’s group in Department of Electronic and Computer Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where she received her Ph.D. degree in 2018. She was also a visiting Ph.D. student in University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab during 2018. Currently, she works in the University of California, Berkeley as a postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Ali Javey’s group in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department. Her research interests mainly focus on using nanostructured materials and novel fabrication techniques to realize printable and wearable electrochemical sensors, energy storage devices for their applications in self-powered system, health monitoring, etc.

Fabrication of Nanostructured Electrochemical Devices and Their Applications in Self-powered Systems

Electrochemical devices that either generate electrical energy via chemical reactions or trigger reactions with electricity have been explored for a variety of applications. Among them, sensors and energy storage devices attract tremendous research interest in recent years mainly due to the rapidly expanding market of wearable and portable devices for applications in clinical diagnosis, physiological monitoring, environmental detection and robotics.

Electrochemical sensors with nanostructures for enzymes immobilization and devices robustness enhancement were integrated into printable sensing patch, and achieved stable and reliable noninvasive health monitoring. The highly improved stability of sensors is extremely desirable for investigation of metabolic activities in physiological systems. Sensors arrays for skin health monitoring are also under development.

With the insight into electrochemical performance enhancement with nanostructures, a scalable and printable approach was further explored to construct novel and unique hierarchical nanocoral structures to realize high performance planar supercapacitors, which are considered as attractive candidates to serve as energy storage devices for portable and wearable electronics with high flexibility and desirable operation safety. Excellent versatility on electrode pattern artistic design has also been achieved due to utilization of inkjet printing technique.

Moreover, a monolithically integrated self-powered smart sensor system for gas detection, with energy supplied by fully printable planar supercapacitors and embedded solar cells, was fabricated on plastic substrate with inkjet printing technique as a proof-of-concept. The as-developed printable nanostructured electrochemical devices in conjunction with printable approach for system integration show great potency in fabrication of various wearable integrated self-powered devices for personalized healthcare monitoring applications.