MICROFLUIDIC MANIPULATION OF COLLOIDAL PARTICLES BY INTERFACIAL FORCES FOR BIOANALYTICAL AND DIAGNOSTICS APPLICATIONS
Date: October 27, 2026 Time: 02:00 PM Location: EE Reading Room
Speaker: Dr. Guido Bolognesi from University College London Supervisor: Dr. Nauman Zaffar Butt
The controlled transport of colloidal particles is of great importance in a broad range of applications, including drug delivery, purification, filtration, sensing and bioanalysis. In this talk, I will present microfluidic approaches that rely on salt concentration gradients to manipulate synthetic and biological particles for material characterisation, analytical and diagnostic applications. Combining experimental analysis with numerical simulations, I will discuss how the interplay between diffusiophoresis and diffusioosmosis – the transport of colloids and liquids induced by salt concentration gradients – enables the reversible trapping and accumulation of particles within dead-end pores, as well as the focusing of colloidal particles within straight open channels under continuous flow. I will then showcase proof-of-concept microdevices that exploit these mechanisms for the continuous size- and surface-chemistry-based separation of polymer particles, and for the measurement of the zeta potential and charged lipid composition of small unilamellar vesicles (SUVs). I will further discuss how the proposed approach can be applied to the detection and separation of protein corona-coated polymer beads from bare particles. Finally, I will show how salt-driven particle manipulation can be implemented in paper-based microfluidic systems and present a novel strategy for enhancing the sensitivity of lateral flow assays based on the on-line manipulation of gold nanoparticles, paving the way for the development of novel diagnostic tools with strong potential for deployment in resource-limited settings.
PHD-EE PROPOSAL DEFENSE "ON IMPLEMENTATION AND SECURITY OF POST-QUANTUM CRYPTOGRAPHY FOR IOT SYSTEMS"
Date: October 28, 2026 Time: 11:15 AM Location: EE Reading Room
Speaker: Muhammad Asim Javaid Supervisor: Dr. Muhammad Ali Siddiqi & Dr. Muhammad Adeel Pasha
Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) addresses the threat posed by quantum computers to public-key cryptography. Its deployment on resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices must balance processing, memory, energy, and communication limits with protection against implementation-level attacks. This thesis investigates PQC deployment through communication integration, computational efficiency, and implementation security.
A medical-device case study integrates Kyber and SABER key establishment over near-field communication (NFC) to protect Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) application data without modifying the BLE stack. An ESP32-S3 and smartphone prototype demonstrates feasibility and identifies communication as the dominant contributor to exchange latency.
For computational efficiency, a binary Ring-LWE implementation on an ARM Cortex-M33 combines packed arithmetic, an optimized message codec, and buffered hardware randomness. The implementation achieves speedups of 4.06×, 3.35×, and 3.01× for key generation, encryption, and decryption, respectively, relative to a scalar baseline before hardening. Implementation security is examined through branch-free execution, redundant verification, and first-order masking, supported by compiled-code inspection, timing measurements, power-leakage tests, and logical fault injection.
The proposed research extends this work to real-time operating systems (RTOS), investigating whether scheduling, context switching, and task isolation expose sensitive PQC state under Micrium OS on the EFM32PG28. Controlled hardware experiments will assess side-channel leakage, sensitive-state persistence in registers and memory, and access across task boundaries. Targeted countermeasures will be evaluated for security effectiveness, correctness, and resource and real-time costs.
Together, these studies aim to inform efficient and secure PQC deployment on constrained embedded platforms, including the effects of operating-system execution on cryptographic security.
27
Oct
Date: October 27, 2026
Time: 02:00 PM
Location: EE Reading Room
Speaker: Dr. Guido Bolognesi from University College London
Supervisor: Dr. Nauman Zaffar Butt
28
Oct
Date: October 28, 2026
Time: 11:15 AM
Location: EE Reading Room
Speaker: Muhammad Asim Javaid
Supervisor: Dr. Muhammad Ali Siddiqi & Dr. Muhammad Adeel Pasha