A Case Study: Setting the Proverbial Bar

For my first blog post, I thought it might be easiest to focus on a subject very near and dear to me: my competition. When I present my research, whether it be at a national conference or to faculty in my department, I am consistently asked whether I am familiar with the work of an MIT professor by the name of Tim Swager who is conducting research on a technology known as fluorescent conjugated polymers. So what follows is a brief run-down on conjugated polymers and a very particular way in which they are important.

Conjugated polymers are, of course, polymers: materials that are composed of interconnected chains of repeating subunits, otherwise known as plastics. These polymers are special because they are composed of subunits with properties that allow the polymer to act more like a conductor or semiconductor than traditional polymers (which are normally insulators). Conjugated polymers may be pumped with electricity or light, depending on the polymer, and the material will fluoresce, or emit light. Because the electronic phenomenon that induces light to be emitted is capable of traveling down the chains of the polymer, the fluorescence is greatly amplified in these materials, which are a special class of conjugated polymers called amplifying fluorescence polymers (AFPs).

Among the many applications of AFPs, the one that is most interesting to me is their use in detection of explosives. Most explosives, such as TNT, are nitro-containing cyclic compounds that are capable of quenching the emission of fluorescent materials when the two are brought close together. Because the fluorescence of the conjugated polymer is inherently amplified, so too is its quenching when it comes into contact with explosives like TNT. Not only has Dr. Swager been able to deploy this premise for detection of explosives in the lab, but he's deployed it commercially. He is currently on the science and technology advisory board of ICx Technologies, a Virginia-based company that develops technology for security and threat protection. Among their products are detection systems that use conjugated polymers to detect airborne explosive vapor.

All in all, it's great to see this type of optical sensing technology jumping out of the laboratory and into commercial use. Despite the dizzying amount of research and mound of patents in this field, technologies like this rarely see the marketplace. I suppose I shouldn't look at this as my competition, but rather as an example of how it should be done.