Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
1.6 Soft Lithography
George Whitesides' group has pioneered a family of microfabrication techniques collectively
dubbed “
sot lithography
” which have in common the use of a micromolded piece of PDMS—
an elastomeric polymer that is best described as transparent rubber, although it does not belong
to the carbon-based rubber family—to generate a pattern or form a device. he stamp is gener-
ally made by replica-molding from a microfabricated master. Hence, sot lithography typically
requires access to some other microfabrication method for the fabrication of the starting mold.
GEORGE WHITESIDES
George M. Whitesides (born August 3, 1939
, Louisville,
Kentucky) is an American chemist and professor of chemistry
at Harvard University. He has contributed to a number of areas,
including NMR spectroscopy, organometallic chemistry, molecular
self-assembly, sot lithography, microfabrication, microluidics, and
nanotechnology. As of December 2011, he held the highest Hirsch
index rating (169) of all living chemists (i.e., he has 169 publications
that have been cited at least 169 times each). His laboratory employs
around 40 people. With the invention of sot lithography (the irst paper in alkanethiol
microstamping was published by
Applied Physics Letters
in July 1993), he has revolution-
ized BioMEMS and microluidics. Recently, Whitesides has developed processes for pro-
ducing analytical microdevices made of paper, which promises to stir a second revolution
in microluidics.
Whitesides received his A.B. degree from Harvard College in 1960 and earned a Ph.D. in
chemistry from Caltech (focusing on the use of NMR spectroscopy in organic chemistry)
in 1964 under the tutelage of John D. Roberts. Whitesides began his independent career
as an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1963 and
remained there until 1982. While at MIT, he played a pivotal role in the development of the
Corey-House-Posner-Whitesides reaction. In 1982, Whitesides moved his laboratory to
the Department of Chemistry at Harvard University. He is currently the Woodford L. and
Ann A. Flowers University Professor at Harvard, one of only 21 University Professorships
at the institution. He is the author of more than 1,000 scientiic articles and is listed as an
inventor on more than 50 patents. Whitesides has mentored more than 300 graduate stu-
dents, postdocs, and visiting scholars. He ranked 5
th
on homson ISI's list of the 1000 most
cited chemists from 1981 to 1997. Whitesides has cofounded more than 12 companies with
a combined market capitalization of more than $20 billion, including Genzyme, GelTex,
heravance, Surface Logix, Nano-Terra, and WMR Biomedical. He serves on the editorial
advisory boards of several scientiic journals, including
Angewandte Chemie
,
Chemistry &
Biology
, and
Small
, and is the Chairman of
Lab on a Chip
.
Among other awards, Whitesides is the recipient of the American Chemical Society's
Award in Pure Chemistry (1975), the Arthur C. Cope Award (1995), the National Medal
of Science (1998), the Kyoto Prize in Materials Science and Engineering (2003), the Dan
David Prize (2005), the Welch Award in Chemistry (2005), the Priestley Medal (2007),
the Dreyfus Prize in the Chemical Sciences (2009), and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in
Chemistry (2009). Whitesides is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering. He is also a
fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
