Chemical Engineer Publishes Six Papers in Professional Journals

Susan Zhou, recently promoted professor of Chemical Engineering, has had six papers published in professional journals since the beginning of 2020. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Membrane Science, ACS Sensors, Sensors, and the Journal of The Electrochemical Society. She was published twice in the same year in Biosensors and Bioelectronics.

She has focused her research on biosensors, with a particular interest in creating a biosensor that can speed diagnosis of Clostridium difficile (C. diff), a dangerous and sometimes fatal gastrointestinal infection. C. diff can be difficult to detect in its early stages, stalling treatment. It infects more than 500,000 people each year in the United States, of whom more than 29,000 die within 30 days of diagnosis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Zhou’s most recent paper, “Batch Fabrication of Electrochemical Sensors on a Glycol-Modified Polyethylene Terephthalate-Based Microfluidic Device,” was published in Biosensors and Bioelectronics. The paper focused on research, funded by the National Science Foundation, to develop low-cost methods for the fabrication of electrochemical microfluidic devices, which is urgently needed for moving these devices from fundamental research to clinical technology. The process is one-step, straightforward, and mass-producible. WPI postdoc Feiyun Cui and PhD students Hamed Jafarisha, Zhiru Zhou, and Jiazhang Chen are co-authors on the paper.

The researcher’s other paper published in Biosensors and Bioelectronics, “Diagnostic Methods and Potential Portable Biosensors for Coronavirus Disease 2019,” focuses on methods of diagnosing SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the COVID-19 illness. Zhou’s paper “Advancing Biosensors with Machine Learning,” published in ACS Sensors, discusses the innovative interdisciplinary use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to advance biosensors’ capabilities.