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 amenities, he determined to remodel his lavatory right into a makeshift lab. Arranging a chunk of plywood over the bath to assist energy sources and measurement units, he performed a research that was later printed in Science Robotics, one of many high journals within the area.
The adversity made for a very good story, however the reality is that it didn’t take a world pandemic to drive Mirvakili to construct the tools he wanted to run his experiments. Even when working in a few of the most well-funded labs on the planet, he wanted to piece collectively instruments to deliver his experiments to life.
“My journey displays a broader reality: With willpower and resourcefulness, many people can obtain outstanding issues,” he says. “There are such a lot of individuals who do not have entry to labs but have nice concepts. We have to make it simpler for them to deliver their experiments to life.”
That’s the thought behind Seron Electronics, an organization Mirvakili based to democratize scientific experimentation. Seron develops scientific tools that exactly sources and measures energy, characterizes supplies, and integrates information 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 various as microelectronics, clear power, optics, and biomedicine.
“Our aim is to grow to be one of many leaders in offering correct and reasonably priced options for researchers,” Mirvakili says. “This imaginative and prescient extends past academia to incorporate firms, governments, nonprofits, and even highschool college students. With Seron’s units, anybody can conduct high-quality experiments, no matter their background or assets.”
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 creating a category of high-performance thermal synthetic muscle mass, together with nylon synthetic muscle mass. Throughout that point, Mirvakili wanted to exactly management the quantity of power that flowed by way of his experimental setups, however he could not discover something on-line that will remedy his drawback.
“I had entry to all types of high-end tools in our lab and the division,” Mirvakili recollects. “It’s all the most recent, state-of-the-art stuff. However I needed to bundle all these outdoors instruments collectively for my work.”
After finishing his PhD, Mirvakili joined Institute Professor Bob Langer’s lab as a postdoc, the place he labored immediately with Langer on a completely totally different drawback in biomedical engineering. In Langer’s famously prolific lab, he noticed researchers struggling to manage temperatures on the microscale for a tool that was encapsulating medicine.
Mirvakili realized the researchers had been finally battling the identical set of issues: the necessity to exactly management electrical present, voltage, and energy. These are additionally issues Mirvakili has seen in his newer analysis into power 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 by way of a desktop utility with minimal sign interference, or noise.
The tools can be utilized to check issues like semiconductor units, actuators, and power storage units, or to exactly cost batteries with out damaging their efficiency.
The tools can be used to check materials efficiency as a result of it might probably measure how supplies react to specific electrical stimulation at a excessive decision, and for high quality management as a result of it might probably check chips and flag issues.
The use circumstances are diverse, however Seron’s overarching aim is to allow extra innovation sooner.
“As a result of our system is so intuitive, you scale back the time to get outcomes,” Mirvakili says. “You’ll be able to set it up in lower than 5 minutes. It’s plug-and-play. Researchers inform us it speeds issues up rather a lot.”
New frontiers
In a latest paper Mirvakili coauthored with MIT analysis affiliate Ehsan Haghighat, Seron’s tools offered fixed energy to a thermal synthetic muscle that built-in machine studying to present it a type of muscle reminiscence. In one other research Mirvakili was not concerned in, a nonprofit analysis group used Seron’s tools to establish a brand new, sustainable sensor materials they’re within the technique of commercializing.
Many makes use of of the machines have come as a shock to Seron’s crew, and so they anticipate to see a brand new wave of functions after they launch a less expensive, transportable model of Seron’s machines this summer time. That would embrace the event of recent bedside screens for sufferers that may detect illnesses, or distant sensors for area work.
Mirvakili thinks a part of the fantastic thing about Seron’s units is that folks within the firm don’t should dream up the experiments themselves. As an alternative, they’ll concentrate on offering highly effective scientific instruments and let the analysis group determine on the very best methods to make use of them.
“Due to the dimensions and the price of this new gadget, it would actually open up the chances for researchers,” Mirvakili says. “Anybody who has a good suggestion ought to have the ability to flip that concept into actuality with our tools and options. In my thoughts, the functions are actually unimaginable and limitless.”
