Recipient of 2006 O'Donnell Award in Engineering

General Dynamics Endowed Faculty Fellow in Engineering
Assistant Professor, Chemical Engineering
The University of Texas at Austin

For more information

• Dr. Loo's biography
• Dr. Loo's research group
• About The University of Texas at Austin and its College of Engineering
• About the Department of Chemical Engineering

About the presentation

Dr. Loo envisions a future where the emerging technology of “plastic electronics” will offer real solutions for society’s technological challenges, ranging from low-cost flexible display backplanes and solar energy collectors, to critical needs in therapeutic and diagnostic medicine, to defense applications such as disposable and wearable electronics, and beyond. To this end, Loo's group’s contributions to this field center on (a) the development of non-invasive patterning tools for establishing efficient electrical contacts to mechanically- and chemically-fragile organic electrically-active materials and (b) the identification of structure and the elucidation of how structural development impacts applications-relevant macroscopic properties in these materials.

Loo has developed nanotransfer printing, a technique for transferring metal contacts and interconnects at ambient conditions. This technique allows her to efficiently contact organic electrically-active materials without exposing it to any solvents, resists, developers, and etchants. More recently, she and her research team have developed “stamp-and-spin-cast”, a patterning technique that has enabled us to directly define conductive features with water-dispersible polymer conductors. Their experiments indicate that these conductive polymer features are as effective as metal contacts when incorporated in organic electronic devices.

Loo's work on materials characterization has focused on solution-processable electrically-active materials. Solution processing – either by spin coating, inkjet printing or roll casting – is compatible with high-speed and low-cost manufacturing. Yet, the performance of electronic devices fabricated with solution-processed electrically-active layers is unremarkable. Subjecting one particular p-type organic semiconductor to a short solvent vapor annealing process, however, dramatically improves device performance. This improvement in device characteristics can be directly correlated with structural and morphological transformations that take place during the annealing process.