About the project
This nuclear magnetic resonance project aims to develop and microfabricate tuned RF coils and Lenz lenses, enhancing signal-to-noise in NMR and MRI experiments on tissues grown on 3D-printed scaffoldings.
3D-printed scaffoldings provide a biodegradable support for growing 3D tissue models. These models, such as cancer models, have properties that more closely resemble real tissues compared to 2D cultures. As a result, they are being closely examined because they offer a more precise and ethically sustainable platform for scientists to test drug efficacy, drug delivery, cell metabolism, imaging methods, and more.
Magnetic Resonance is a non-destructive and harmless technique that provides both static and dynamic information on a wide range of samples. It can be used on both in-vivo and ex-vivo tissues. The technique suffers by a low sensitivity that makes it not particularly competitive to other imaging techniques when it comes to spatial resolution.
In this project, we aim to overcome some of these limitations by improving signal to noise when detecting endogenous metabolites and localising exogenous drugs in tissue grown on 3D-printed scaffoldings. This improvement will be achieved through microfabricated tuned coils and Lenz lenses, whose geometry and properties are optimised to match the sample's characteristics, and integrated on portable bioreactors that allow cells to proliferate inside the NMR/MRI instrument.
This highly interdisciplinary project gives you an active role in designing coils, optimising them through numerical simulations, microfabricating them in our state-of-the-art clean room facility, and running magnetic resonance experiments.
The Magnetic Resonance Centre boasts extensive expertise, covering spin dynamics theory, NMR methodology in solid and liquid states, microfluidics, protein NMR in both liquid and solid states, NMR at cryogenic temperatures, and micro-imaging.
The Zepler Institute nanofabrication facility at Southampton is home to one of Europe's largest university cleanrooms, capable of manufacturing electronic, photonics, and mechanical structures with sub-10 nm resolution.
The ideal start date is January 2025, although later dates are also possible.
