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Dr. Mo Mirbakiri ’17 was in the middle of an experiment as a postdoctoral fellow at MIT when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Dealing with limited access to his research facilities, he decides to turn his home bathroom into a makeshift laboratory. He conducted his research by placing plywood over the bathtub to support the power supply and measuring equipment, and the research was later published in a journal. science roboticsone of the top journals in this field.
Adversity has produced good stories, but the truth is that Mirvakili didn’t need a global pandemic to build the equipment needed to carry out his experiments. Even if you were working in one of the most well-funded laboratories in the world, you still had to combine tools to make your experiments happen.
“My journey reflects a broader truth: With determination and resourcefulness, many of us can accomplish amazing things,” he says. “There are many people with great ideas who don’t have access to a lab. We need to make it easier for them to realize their experiments.”
That’s the idea behind Theron Electronics, the company Mirvakili founded to democratize scientific experimentation. Seron develops scientific instruments that accurately deliver and measure electrical power, characterize materials, and integrate data into customizable software platforms.
By making sophisticated experiments more accessible, Theron aims to spark a new wave of innovation across fields as diverse as microelectronics, clean energy, optics, and biomedicine.
“Our goal is to be one of the leaders in providing accurate and affordable solutions to researchers,” says Mirvakili. “This vision extends beyond academia to include businesses, government, nonprofit organizations, and even high school students. Seron devices allow anyone to conduct high-quality experiments, regardless of their background or resources. can.”
Feel the need for constant power
Mirvakili earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering and then a doctorate in mechanical engineering from MIT under Professor Ian Hunter. In this research, he was involved in the development of high-performance thermal artificial muscles, including nylon artificial muscles. Meanwhile, Milvakili needed to precisely control the amount of energy flowing to his experimental equipment, but he couldn’t find anything online that would solve his problem.
“Our lab and department had access to all kinds of high-end equipment,” Mirvakili recalls. “It’s all modern, cutting-edge stuff. But we needed to bring all of these external tools together for the job.”
After receiving his Ph.D., Mirbakiri joined Professor Bob Langer’s lab at the Institute as a postdoctoral fellow, where he collaborated directly with Langer on very different problems in biomedical engineering. In his famously prolific lab, Langer observed researchers struggling to control the temperature of devices that encapsulate drugs at the microscale.
Mirvakili realized that researchers were ultimately plagued by the same set of problems: the need to precisely control current, voltage, and power. These are also questions Mirbakiri has seen in recent research on energy storage and solar cells. He founded his Seron Electronics after speaking with researchers at conferences around the world and seeing that the need was widespread.
Seron calls the first version of its product the SE Programmable Power Platform. The platform allows users to source and measure precisely defined amounts of voltage, current, power, and charge through a desktop application while minimizing signal interference and noise.
This equipment can be used to study semiconductor devices, actuators, energy storage devices, etc., as well as to accurately charge batteries without compromising their performance.
The device can also be used to study material performance, as it can measure at high resolution how a material responds to precise electrical stimulation. It can also be used for quality control, as chips can be tested and problems flagged.
While the use cases vary, Seron’s overarching goal is to help you innovate more, faster.
“Our system is very intuitive, which reduces the time to results,” says Mirvakili. “It takes less than five minutes to set up. It’s plug-and-play. Researchers report that it significantly speeds up the process.”
new frontier
In a recent paper In Mirvakili’s co-author with MIT researcher Ethan Hagihat, Theron’s device provided constant power to thermal artificial muscles that integrated machine learning to provide a type of muscle memory. In another study not involving Mirvakili, a nonprofit research organization used Theron’s equipment to identify new sustainable sensor materials that are moving toward commercialization.
The many uses for these machines are a surprise to Seron’s team, and they expect to see a new wave of applications once cheaper, portable versions of Seron’s machines are released this summer. That could include developing new bedside monitors for patients that can detect the disease and remote sensors for field operations.
Mirvakili believes part of the beauty of Theron’s device is that people at the company don’t have to come up with the experiments themselves. Instead, we can focus on providing powerful scientific tools and let the research community decide how best to use them.
“The size and cost of this new device really opens up possibilities for researchers,” says Mirvakili. “Anyone with a good idea should be able to use our equipment and solutions to turn that idea into reality. In my opinion, the applications are truly unimaginable and limitless. .”
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