Daniel Ahmed

Biography

Daniel was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He finished his bachelor (with honors), masters and doctoral studies in the department of Engineering Science and Mechanics at Pennsylvania State University-University Park. After which, he went back to Bangladesh and started a lab-on-chip diagnostics company in 2014. In 2015, he became an assistant professor at North South University. He resigned his job to join the Multi-scale robotics Lab at ETH Zurich. His multidisciplinary research focuses on utilizing acoustics in microsystems to develop innovative and important technologies in physics, chemistry, biology, engineering and in medicine. He developed acoustic based microswimmer such that the design overcomes the commonly-held design paradigm that microswimmers must use non-reciprocal motion to achieve propulsion; instead, the swimmer is propelled by oscillatory motion of an air bubble trapped within the swimmer’s polymer body. He also developed acoustic-based tunable and pulsatile chemical gradient and chemical waveform generator in microfluidics. He investigated the frequency-dependent activation and internalization of transmembrane receptors of living cells. Also, he developed an acoustic method to perform rotation of bioparticles and small organism. Rotation motion, which adds another dimension to manipulation, could become an important function in single-cell and small-organism surgeries, 3-D image construction and drug discovery. Earlier in his research, he and his colleagues developed the first surface-acoustic-wave based acoustic tweezers to manipulate and pattern bioparticles in microfluidics. In the multi-scale robotics lab he is interested in merging acoustic and magnetic fields to develop exciting multipurpose microswimmers and also explore numerous biomedical applications

Research Interest

ROBOTS