Notre Dame Nanoscience and Technology (NDnano) has announced the awardees of the inaugural Notre Dame Nanofabrication Facility (NDNF) Support Grants. The grant program is designed to catalyze new research involving the NDNF, a world-class, 9,000 square-foot teaching and research cleanroom, by supporting faculty members who have limited experience utilizing the tools and infrastructure of the facility.
The NDNF houses a comprehensive suite of state-of-the-art nanofabrication and testing equipment, which can be used across a wide range of materials and processes, including silicon-related electronic devices, compound semiconductors, nanowires, carbon nanotubes, graphene, and organic polymer-based materials. The facility also enables the study of microfluidic technologies for medical applications and micron-scale mechanical device fabrication.
“Our goal with this program is to lower the barrier to entry for nano-scale innovation at Notre Dame,” said Steven Koester, director of NDnano. “These grants will empower a broader cohort of researchers to combine their unique expertise with the state-of-the-art infrastructure of the NDNF and drive new discoveries.”
The research interests of the faculty selected for Support Grants in this cycle span electronic device fabrication, biofluid collection and sensing, and quantum microscopy. Their projects are described in detail below.
Pioneering nanomaterial probes for quantum microscopy
Conventional scanning probe microscopy offers limited flexibility in the materials that can serve as probes. Xiaolong Liu, assistant professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy, will explore two new experimental approaches for replacing conventional metal probe tips with nanofabricated, two-dimensional flakes, which would offer new functionality while retaining nanoscale spatial resolution. Liu’s research group will employ the etching and depositing capabilities of the NDNF to fabricate the experimental nano-tips.
Nanofabricating surfaces for biomarker detection in exhaled breath
Exhaled breath condensate (EBC) — a liquid sample collected by cooling exhaled breath — provides a non-invasive way to capture biomarkers of respiratory disease. No EBC-based tests, however, have received clinical approval to date, because of poor clinical reliability when volatile biomarkers undergo uncontrolled evaporation loss on conventional collector surfaces. Jingcheng Ma, assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, will utilize NDNF’s advanced instrumentation to fabricate new surfaces that are nanoengineered to collect EBC to minimize evaporation loss and increase clinical reliability.
Harnessing new strategies for microelectronics fabrication
Crafting next generation, ultra-small transistors requires highly selective etching in order to maintain the shape and integrity of the transistor during fabrication. Conventional dry-etching methods, however, lack the selectivity for the fashioning of three-dimensional transistors. Marko Radosavljević, professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, will use the NDNF’s instruments to develop grayscale lithography solutions that could be utilized to fabricate cryogenic complementary metal-oxide-semiconductors, as well as optical and photonic components.
To learn more about NDnano and the NDNF Support Grants program, please visit NDnano’s website.
Originally published at research.nd.edu by Erin Fennessy on June 30, 2026.