Mo Mirvakili PhD ’17 was in the midst of an experiment as a postdoc at MIT when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. Grappling with restricted entry to laboratory services, he determined to remodel his rest room right into a makeshift lab. Arranging a chunk of plywood over the tub to help energy sources and measurement gadgets, he performed a examine that was later revealed in Science Robotics, one of many high journals within the subject.
The adversity made for a very good story, however the reality is that it didn’t take a world pandemic to power Mirvakili to construct the gear he wanted to run his experiments. Even when working in among the most well-funded labs on the planet, he wanted to piece collectively instruments to carry his experiments to life.
“My journey displays a broader reality: With dedication and resourcefulness, many people can obtain exceptional issues,” he says. “There are such a lot of individuals who haven’t got entry to labs but have nice concepts. We have to make it simpler for them to carry their experiments to life.”
That’s the thought behind Seron Electronics, an organization Mirvakili based to democratize scientific experimentation. Seron develops scientific gear that exactly sources and measures energy, characterizes supplies, and integrates knowledge right into a customizable software program platform.
By making refined experiments extra accessible, Seron goals to spur a brand new wave of innovation throughout fields as numerous as microelectronics, clear vitality, optics, and biomedicine.
“Our objective is to develop into one of many leaders in offering correct and reasonably priced options for researchers,” Mirvakili says. “This imaginative and prescient extends past academia to incorporate corporations, governments, nonprofits, and even highschool college students. With Seron’s gadgets, anybody can conduct high-quality experiments, no matter their background or sources.”
Feeling the necessity for fixed energy
Mirvakili earned his bachelor’s and grasp’s levels in electrical engineering, adopted by a PhD in mechanical engineering underneath MIT Professor Ian Hunter, which concerned growing a category of high-performance thermal synthetic muscle tissue, together with nylon synthetic muscle tissue. Throughout that point, Mirvakili wanted to exactly management the quantity of vitality that flowed via his experimental setups, however he could not discover something on-line that will resolve his downside.
“I had entry to all types of high-end gear in our lab and the division,” Mirvakili remembers. “It’s all the most recent, state-of-the-art stuff. However I needed to bundle all these exterior instruments collectively for my work.”
After finishing his PhD, Mirvakili joined Institute Professor Bob Langer’s lab as a postdoc, the place he labored straight with Langer on a completely totally different downside in biomedical engineering. In Langer’s famously prolific lab, he noticed researchers struggling to regulate temperatures on the microscale for a tool that was encapsulating medication.
Mirvakili realized the researchers had been finally fighting the identical set of issues: the necessity to exactly management electrical present, voltage, and energy. These are additionally issues Mirvakili has seen in his more moderen analysis into vitality storage and photo voltaic cells. After talking with researchers at conferences from around the globe to substantiate the necessity was widespread, he began Seron Electronics.
Seron calls the primary model of its merchandise the SE Programmable Energy Platforms. The platforms enable customers to supply and measure exactly outlined portions {of electrical} voltage, present, energy, and cost via a desktop utility with minimal sign interference, or noise.
The gear can be utilized to review issues like semiconductor gadgets, actuators, and vitality storage gadgets, or to exactly cost batteries with out damaging their efficiency.
The gear may also be used to review materials efficiency as a result of it could actually measure how supplies react to express electrical stimulation at a excessive decision, and for high quality management as a result of it could actually take a look at chips and flag issues.
The use circumstances are different, however Seron’s overarching objective is to allow extra innovation quicker.
“As a result of our system is so intuitive, you cut back the time to get outcomes,” Mirvakili says. “You possibly can set it up in lower than 5 minutes. It’s plug-and-play. Researchers inform us it speeds issues up quite a bit.”
New frontiers
In a recent paper Mirvakili coauthored with MIT analysis affiliate Ehsan Haghighat, Seron’s gear offered fixed energy to a thermal synthetic muscle that built-in machine studying to provide it a type of muscle reminiscence. In one other examine Mirvakili was not concerned in, a nonprofit analysis group used Seron’s gear to establish a brand new, sustainable sensor materials they’re within the strategy of commercializing.
Many makes use of of the machines have come as a shock to Seron’s group, they usually count on to see a brand new wave of purposes once they launch a less expensive, portable version of Seron’s machines this summer time. That would embrace the event of latest bedside screens for sufferers that may detect illnesses, or distant sensors for subject work.
Mirvakili thinks a part of the fantastic thing about Seron’s gadgets is that folks within the firm don’t need to dream up the experiments themselves. As an alternative, they’ll deal with offering highly effective scientific instruments and let the analysis group resolve on the most effective methods to make use of them.
“Due to the scale and the price of this new gadget, it should actually open up the chances for researchers,” Mirvakili says. “Anybody who has a good suggestion ought to be capable of flip that concept into actuality with our gear and options. In my thoughts, the purposes are actually unimaginable and infinite.”
