Friday, January 22, 2010

PhD Topic Chosen

I'm pleased to report that after careful thought over the past couple months, I have chosen a topic for to pursue for my PhD. I discussed this with my advisor, and he was enthusiastic about the choice. I followed these basic logical steps:

1) I built a machine that manufactures small plastic devices called "microfluidic chips" for my Master's degree

2) Most of the academic papers I see now involve chips that are made of plastic AND metal.

3) The methods for making these plastic/metal chips are slow, expensive, and not suited to making lots of chips.

4) If these chips are going to change the world (which I think they can), people are going to need thousands and thousands of them.

5) I am good at designing and building equipment to make thousands and thousands of things.

Ergo,

I plan to build a machine that spits out thousands of plastic chips with metal in them.

But that doesn't sound fancy enough, and of course academia is all about the scientific sounding words, so the actual title of my PhD proposal is:

Development of Manufacturing Equipment for Integrated Metal-Polymer Microscale Parts

2 comments:

  1. Look nice :)

    could microfluidic chip be used for molecular genetic research (kinda like the chips used by 23andMe)?

    on another subject, what happened to your transfer to business school as refered in your Thursday december 10 post (turning to the dark side)?

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