Lanthanide-Containing Microspheres


Department of Chemistry, University of Toronto


As a PhD student at the University of Toronto, I am designing and executing the synthetic procedures and characterization methods for my research project titled “Lanthanide-containing polymer particles for mass cytometry-based bioassays”.

This research project is a part of university-wide project that addresses an urgent need for improvement of detection and characterization of cancer cells. This provides improved accuracy and sensitivity of diagnosis of leukemia and other diseases, which are often misdiagnosed or diagnosed too late due to the small number of markers used in detection. A high number of detected disease markers allows for personalized diagnosis and treatment. We utilize mass cytometry technique that was invented by our collaborators in DVS sciences to analyze cells or microspheres on cytometric bases i.e. one by one.

My role in the project is to synthesize polymer microspheres with different particles sizes and very narrow size distribution. The microspheres are encoded with mixture of lanthanide metals at different levels of concentration. In addition, I functionalize the particles surface with amino-silica shell to bio-conjugate them with antibodies.

Please check my publications for more information on this project.

Lanthanide Encoded Polymer Nanoparticles


Department of Chemistry, University of Toronto


In an earlier project in my PhD I used miniemulsion polymerization to synthesize polymer nanoparticles loaded with lanthanide complexes, for cancer stem cell detection and other biological tagging applications.

Please check my publications for more information on this project.

Gold Nanoparticles Self-assembly


Department of Electronic Chemistry, Tokyo Institute of Technology


When I was awarded Honors Scholarship (MONBUSH) from the Japanese government, I joined Ohsaka group to pursue my master studies in Tokyo Institute of Technology.

My research project focused on catalyzing the molecular oxygen reduction for fuel cell applications. I synthesized gold nanoparticles and used them to fabricate three-dimensionally superstructures of gold nanoparticles over different substrates and studied their electro-catalytic activities.

Please check my publications for more information on this project.

Summary of Achievements