Background
Brian Iverson was hired as a faculty member in the Mechanical Engineering Department at BYU in 2012. Prior to his appointment, he worked as a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM. He completed his M.S., Ph.D. and postdoctoral position at Purdue University and worked as a visiting researcher at the Research Triangle Institute International in Durham, NC. He is also a graduate of BYU. He has served as an associate editor for the Journal of Heat Transfer and works in several areas associated with heat and mass transfer, including methods that efficiently detect sparsely populated target molecules.
Cancer Research
Early detection methods for cancer screening require the ability to recognize the presence of biomarkers that are typically only sparsely populated in a sample in low concentration. In the interest of early detection, we target approaches that enable low concentration detection by exploiting high surface area to volume ratio structures that improve mass transfer and can efficiently capture/detect target biomarkers. In order to make these detection methods widely accessible and provide point-of-care diagnostics, we employ electrochemical-based biosensors comprised of interdigitated electrodes and monitored with electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). EIS is often employed as a sensing modality for immunosensors due to its ability to detect small variations in resistance/capacitance which offers the potential for label-free, real-time, and in situ detection of various analytes. Moreover, electrochemical IDEs have shown tremendous promise in detecting cancer linked proteins with low detection limits and wide sensing ranges.