Dr Scott Martin

Biography

After completing my PhD (physics - molecular electronics) in the UK I joined CSIRO in 1994 and started working on various biosensor projects for a CRC, an IVD company (AGEN Biomedical) and on a strategic project. Transduction mechanisms used included trans-membrane conduction in synthetic cell walls, surface plasmon resonance, nephelometry, lateral flow sandwich assay. Later in the 90's I transferred 100% to the evolved CRC which had become AMBRI Pty Ltd. Working with new colleagues from the Nucleus Group, I became project leader for an instrument development team creating the readout instrument for the AMBRI Biosensor to be used in a 96 well microtitre plate format for drug discovery. Although tracking successfully, the project was abandoned when AMBRI's target market was shifted by and incoming CEO and I was reassigned as Senior Production Manager responsible for the team of 10 producing 10,000 sensors per week for researchers and external partners. The fabrication process was complex and technical involving thin film deposition in a cleanroom, ellipsometric QC, various chemical incubation treatments and culminating in a robotic fluidic self-assembly process. Initially, managing the sensor orders, workflow, chemical batch consumption and delivery/ageing issues took me several hours per day, however, I created a Laboratory Information Management System which allowed researchers to order sensors, customisation and timing based on available resources. The production team then received their workflow and materials selections from the LIMS and all batch history records were available to researchers. When implemented, the system reduced my daily oversight of the scheduling to about 15 minutes. With the production team, we standardised, automated and expanded capacity so that we were soon able to produce many times more sensors than before.

Research Interest

Transducers for medical diagnostics