(she/her/hers)
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
nano electronics, solid-state nanopore, biosensors
Mingye Xiong is a Ph.D. candidate in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Jean-Pierre Leburton. Her research interest lies in the theory and simulation of nanoscale semiconductor devices, biomolecule detection and manipulation with a solid-state nanopore, and the properties of sub-nanoporous solid-state membranes in the ionic environment. She is a recipient of the Linda Su-Nan Chang Sah Doctoral Fellowship, Mavis Future Faculty Fellowship, YEE Fellowship, and Gregory Stillman Research Award.
2D solid-state nanopore for biomolecule sensing via electronic current
The two-dimensional solid-state nanopore has drawn significant attention for its potential in fast and accurate biomolecule sensing with additional advances in its label-free feature, high tolerance for the chemical environment, well-controlled shape and size, and the possibility of a scalable sensing platform. Yet, solid-state nanopore still faces the obstacle of low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), unclear ionic and electronic transport phenomena, and inaccurate single-nucleotide identification. Also, as the pore size further shrinks to the sub-nanometer regime, the system shows more interesting phenomena, including ion gating and ion filtering.
To provide a better understanding of 2D solid-state nanopore sensing, we developed a comprehensive analysis of the electronic current variation in a MoS2 nanopore nanoribbon, combining semiclassical electron transport model, experimental transport characterization with molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, and multigrid Poisson-Boltzmann modeling. This study provided a coherent interpretation of nanopore sensing and optimized the design parameters for high sensitivity. In an effort to improve SNR, we investigated noise reduction and homopolymer nucleotide detection in stacked 2D membrane nanopores. With combined time series analysis and statistical testing, this study realizes homopolymer nucleotide identification and proposed an improved structural design to reduce noises physically.