Wochenübersicht

Aerosol particles are an important constituent of the global climate system. They not only affect the atmospheric radiation budget through scattering and absorption of solar radiation and through their role as cloud/ice nuclei but also impact air quality and human health. Both natural and human processes contribute to the global aerosol load. Whereas coarse‐mode aerosol (>1 μm diameter) mainly originates from natural aerosol sources, fine mode aerosol is frequently associated with human activities. Although substantial effort has been undertaken in the last decades to improve our knowledge about aerosols and their role in the global climate system, aerosol‐cloud‐radiation interactions still pose the largest uncertainty to estimates and interpretations of the Earth’s changing energy budget (IPCC, 2013). In order to decrease these uncertainties, research is necessary. Thereby, research aircraft like the German Aerospace Center (DLR) Falcon and the NASA DC‐8 provide unique platforms to study the horizontal and vertical distribution of aerosols and their microphysical, chemical and optical properties. In this talk, I will introduce aerosols in general, and discuss their effects on the atmosphere and climate. Furthermore, I will show selected results from airborne field experiments with the DLR research aircraft Falcon and the NASA research aircraft DC8 studying the long‐range transport of mineral dust (SALTRACE project), the global distribution of coarse mode aerosols (ATom project), and aerosol mixtures in the Eastern Mediterranean (A‐LIFE project).

New health initiatives with global healthcare, precision medicine and point-of-care diagnostics are demanding breakthrough developments in biosensing and bioanalytical tools. Current biosensors are lacking precision, bulky, and costly, as well as they require long detection times, sophisticated infrastructure and trained personnel, which limit their application areas. My laboratory is focused on to address these challenges by exploiting novel optical phenomena at nanoscale and engineering toolkits such as nanophotonics, nanofabrication, microfluidics and data science. In particular, we use photonic nanostructures based on plasmonics and dielectric metasurfaces that can confine light below the fundamental diffraction limit and generate strong electromagnetic fields in nanometric volumes. In this talk I will present how we exploit nanophotonics and combine it with imaging, biology, chemistry and data science techniques to achieve high performance biosensors. I will introduce ultra-sensitive Mid-IR biosensors based on surface enhanced infrared spectroscopy for chemical specific detection of molecules, large-area chemical imaging and real-time monitoring of protein conformations in aqueous environment. Next, I will describe our effort to develop ultra-compact, portable, rapid and low-cost microarrays and their use for early disease diagnostics in real-world settings. Finally, I will highlight label-free optofluidic biosensors that can perform one-of-a-kind measurements on live cells down to the single cell level, and provide their prospects in biomedical and clinical applications.