Sambeeta Das

Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering | University of Delaware

Newark, DE, UNITED STATES

Prof. Das’s research spans robotics, autonomous systems, physics, organic chemistry and materials engineering.

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Researcher develops microrobots to battle cancer with unique precision

2024-05-01

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Biography

Dr. Sambeeta ‘Sam’ Das is an assistant professor at the University of Delaware in the Mechanical Engineering Department. Before joining the University of Delaware, Dr. Das was a postdoctoral researcher for three years at the University of Pennsylvania. She was part of the GRASP Lab where she worked on microrobotic control and application of microrobots in biological systems. She earned her Ph.D. at the Pennsylvania State University in 2016 and her doctoral research was on directing micro and nanomotors and their applications in lab-on-a chip devices. Prior to her doctoral studies, she earned her Masters with distinction from the University of London and her Bachelors in Physics from Presidency College, India. She is the recipient of multiple awards including a graduate fellowship from the Pennsylvania State University, the overseas research award fellowship from the government of United Kingdom, and the Science and Engineering Excellence Fellowship from the University of London.

Dr. Das’s research is very interdisciplinary spanning multiple fields like robotics, autonomous systems, physics, organic chemistry, materials engineering, soft matter, and biomedical engineering. The goal of her lab is to seamlessly combine these disparate disciplines to address challenges in tissue engineering. Her research activities focus on develop microrobots capable of precision delivery of biochemicals and cellular patterning; for applications in personalized therapeutics, drug delivery, and high throughput biotechnology research.

Industry Expertise (3)

Biotechnology

Nanotechnology

Energy

Areas of Expertise (7)

Biomechanical Engineering

Clean Energy & Environment

Materials Engineering

Biomechanics

Fluid Mechanics

Nanotechnology

Robotics & Controls

Media Appearances (4)

Mechanical cures | UDaily

University of Delaware online

2023-01-04

Sambeeta Das, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Delaware, was recently awarded a $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award program, which is part of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, to support student-driven groundbreaking research in her laboratory in the College of Engineering.

Meet me on the cutting edge | UDaily

University of Delaware online

2021-04-06

“Just call me Sam.” That’s what Professor Sambeeta Das will ask of you, with a warm smile. But don’t let her humility fool you. She’s boldly forging into little-known territory, into an exciting world you can see only with high-powered microscopes, where sci-fi meets reality. Her dream is to develop self-driving microrobots that would act like “helper bees,” working with engineered stem cells, actually doing nanosurgery at the cellular level to create artificial organs and fill a dire need. Every 10 minutes, another name is added to the national organ transplant list, and the agonizing wait begins.

You’re being watched: The dangers of ProctorU

UD Review online

2020-10-13

Sambeeta Das, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, is teaching a graduate-level course this semester and will not use surveillance measures for her exams. “I don’t want students to feel like I don’t trust them, because these are graduate-level students and at this point, they should be responsible; they should understand the consequences of cheating,” Das said. “‘Because in the end, it doesn’t harm me; it only harms them. And they should realize what is the right or wrong thing to do.”

Microscopic swimming devices could deliver drugs to targeted places in the human body

Homecare.co.uk online

2015-12-16

The research which was published in Nature Communications was a collaborative project led by Dr Stephen Ebbens with Dr Jon Howse and Dr Andrew Campbell from the University of Sheffield; Professor Ramin Golestanian, University of Oxford; Professor Ayusman Sen, Professor Darrell Velegol, Sambeeta Das and Astha Garg, Penn State University. The UK research team were funded by the EPSRC.

Articles (5)

Automated control of catalytic Janus micromotors

MRS Advances

2023 Our study presents an accurate and automated control mechanism for Janus micromotors powered by catalytic reactions. This system utilizes fully controllable electromagnetic coils to direct the magnetic field toward a reference point, causing the particles to move in response to the catalytic decomposition of hydrogen peroxide. Magnetic torques without human intervention are applied to the particles, allowing them to align and move precisely. To ensure precise control, we have implemented algorithms that guide the particles to a desired location. In addition, a desired trajectory made up of multiple such points enables the active particles to move along more general and complex trajectories.

ModMag: A modular magnetic micro-robotic manipulation device

MethodsX

2023 Electromagnetic systems have been used extensively for the control of magnetically actuated objects, such as in microrheology and micro- robotics research. Therefore, optimizing the design of such systems is highly desirable. Some of the features that are lacking in most cur- rent designs are compactness, portability, and versatility. Portability is especially relevant for biomedical applications in which in vivo or in vitro testing may be conducted in locations away from the laboratory microscope. This document describes the design, fabrication, and imple- mentation of a compact, low-cost, versatile, and user-friendly device (the ModMag) capable of controlling multiple electromagnetic setups, includ- ing a two-dimensional 4-coil configuration, a 3-dimensional Helmholtz configuration, a 2-dimensional magnetic tweezer configuration, and a piezoelectric transducer for producing acoustic waves.

Multistimuli-responsive microrobots: A comprehensive review

Frontiers in Robotics and AI

2022 Untethered robots of the size of a few microns have attracted increasing attention for the potential to transform many aspects of manufacturing, medicine, health care, and bioengineering. Previously impenetrable environments have become available for high-resolution in situ and in vivo manipulations as the size of the untethered robots goes down to the microscale. Nevertheless, the independent navigation of several robots at the microscale is challenging as they cannot have onboard transducers, batteries, and control like other multi-agent systems, due to the size limitations. Therefore, various unconventional propulsion mechanisms have been explored to power motion at the nanoscale. Moreover, a variety of combinations of actuation methods has also been extensively studied to tackle different issues.

Cellular expression through morphogen delivery by light activated magnetic microrobots

Journal of Micro-Bio Robotics

2019 Microrobots have many potential uses in microbiology since they can be remotely actuated and precisely manipulated in biochemical fluids. Cellular function and response depends on biochemicals. Therefore, various delivery methods have been developed for delivering biologically relevant cargo using microrobots. However, localized targeting without payload leakage during transport is challenging. Here, we design a microrobotic platform capable of on-demand delivery of signaling molecules in biological systems. The on-demand delivery method is based on a light-responsive photolabile linker which releases a cell-to-cell signaling molecule when exposed to light, integrated on the surface of microrobots. Successful delivery of the signaling molecules and subsequent gene regulation is also demonstrated.

Experiments and open-loop control of multiple catalytic microrobots

Journal of Micro-Bio Robotics

2018 The ability to direct microrobots in the low Reynolds number regime has broad applications in engineering, biology and medicine. In contrast to externally driven robots, catalytically driven microrobots utilize chemical reactions to hyphenate all instances in solution. Controlling multiple self propelled microrobots in the same workspace has been an ongoing challenge for the field. In this paper we present a novel method for open loop control of multiple microrobots in the same workspace by combining their catalytic actuation with magnetic actuation. By using a catalytic cap to regulate the directions of motion and leveraging the inherent variations in model parameters in a collection of paramagnetic microrobots, we show how collective motion patterns can be achieved. We validate our proposed strategy in simulations using a simple kinematic model of each robot, and in experiments.

Sambeeta Das

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