BASc Chemical Engineer based in Waterloo
I'm passionate about chemical engineering and the breadth of places it can be applied — biomedical devices, energy, and production pipelines among them. Outside of school and work, I spend time on personal projects that push my understanding in directions coursework doesn't always reach.
Research on biohybrid microrobots, sperm bundling, biofilm disruption, and quantum sensing applications at the University of Waterloo's Medical Microbotics Lab.
Fabricate and characterize microscale structures using alginate, PDMS, and DLP microfabrication. Design and support microfluidic and biological experiments involving bacterial cultures and sperm analysis. Analyze experimental data with Python and ImageJ/Fiji.
Manage point-of-sale operations, cash handling, and trade negotiations, keeping transactions accurate and the customer experience positive.
Assist customers with product selection and trade assessments — work that has sharpened my negotiation and interpersonal skills and meaningfully lifted customer satisfaction.
Small-scale, flexible magnetic robots that deliver antibiotics directly to the site of urinary tract infections — an alternative to systemic oral antibiotics and the side effects that come with them.
The alginate-based filament robots are loaded with norfloxacin and wirelessly navigated through the urinary tract using rotating magnetic fields. In synthetic human urine they suppressed E. coli growth more effectively than a free antibiotic solution, using up to 3,200× less drug than a standard oral dose. We also demonstrated real-time ultrasound imaging and magnetic guidance through an ex vivo porcine ureter, kidney, and renal pelvis — showing the approach is feasible for minimally invasive clinical use.
By concentrating treatment at the infection site, this platform aims to reduce systemic side effects, lower overall antibiotic use, and help slow the rise of antibiotic resistance.
A biological microrobot that uses bull sperm to break through bacterial biofilms and deliver antibiotics directly to the infection site. Biofilms — the protective matrices that bacteria like E. coli form on surfaces such as urinary catheters — can be up to 1,000× more resistant to antibiotics than free-floating bacteria, making catheter-associated UTIs especially hard to treat.
SPARTN combines two strategies. Bull sperm are naturally equipped to penetrate dense extracellular matrices (their normal job is reaching an egg through the cumulus layer), and their small size, erratic tail motion, and surface-hugging swimming make them well-suited to disrupting biofilm structure. We pair them with drug-loaded gelatin particles that bind to the negatively charged sperm head through electrostatic attraction, then degrade to release antibiotics where they're needed.
By mechanically disrupting the biofilm and delivering antibiotics locally, SPARTN aims to overcome a major barrier to treating chronic and catheter-associated infections — without relying on toxic chemical agents.
In bull sperm, cells sometimes cluster into transient groups called "bundles" rather than swimming individually — a phenomenon whose underlying causes remain poorly understood. My research investigates why bundling occurs by analyzing the motility patterns of individual and bundled sperm using machine learning–based tracking software.
By quantifying swimming speed, trajectory, and beat dynamics across large populations of cells, we work to identify the motility signatures that distinguish bundling sperm from solo swimmers, and to test what conditions favor bundle formation. Understanding this behavior offers insight into sperm competition, fertility, and the collective dynamics of biological microswimmers — knowledge that also informs the design of sperm-based microrobots for biomedical applications.
Reactive oxygen species (ROS) play a critical role in sperm function — at normal levels they support processes like capacitation and fertilization, but excess ROS causes oxidative stress that damages DNA and impairs motility, contributing to male infertility. Measuring ROS inside individual sperm cells with high sensitivity remains a major challenge.
My research uses nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center nanodiamonds as quantum sensors to detect ROS at the single-cell level. The nanodiamonds are embedded into microtubes fabricated using digital micromirror device (DMD) lithography, creating confined structures that guide sperm cells into close contact with the sensors. By measuring shifts in the NV center's spin properties, we can probe local ROS concentrations with nanoscale spatial resolution — offering a new window into sperm oxidative biology and a potential diagnostic tool for fertility assessment.
