Regina Ragan
Professor, Materials Science and Engineering
Professor, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Co-Director, Institute for Design and Manufacturing Innovation
Education and Outreach Director, Center for Complex and Active Materials – an NSF MRSEC
| Location: | 744E Engineering Tower | |
| Email: | rragan@uci.edu | |
| Phone: | (949) 824-6830 | |
| Fax: | (949) 824-2541 | |
| Address: | The Henry Samueli School of Engineering University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA 92697-2585 |
Profile
Ragan is a recipient of the National Science Foundation Faculty Early CAREER Award and a Fulbright Fellow. She is co-Director of the Institute for Design and Manufacturing Innovation and Education Director for the Center for Complex Active Materials (CCAM – an NSF MRSEC). She received her B.S. summa cum laude in Material Science and Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles and Ph.D. in Applied Physics from the California Institute of Technology where she was awarded as a NSF, Bell Laboratories, and Intel Fellow. As postdoctoral scholar in the Information & Quantum Systems Laboratory at Hewlett Packard, Ragan worked on emerging technologies including molecular electronics that provided fundamental understanding leading to memristors, a resistive RAM technology. Since joining the Faculty at UC Irvine, she began a research effort in self-assembly as she foresaw this would play a vital role in (nano) manufacturing of nanoscale devices and pioneered methods for assembling colloidal metal nanoparticles into photonic devices, a nascent research area a decade ago. Her activities include investigating and gaining fundamental understanding material platforms capable of assembling at scale, integration in device architectures, and connecting architecture design with device performance.
Education
PhD, California Institute of Technology, 2004
Research
Ragan’s laboratory pursues interdisciplinary research (material science, chemistry, and physics) to overcome scientific and technological challenges associated with novel device development. Self-assembly using chemical and thermodynamic driving forces allows us to arrange assemble systems with molecular scale control on millimeter length scales. Tailoring molecular structure on composites formed via spinodal decomposition and having tunable and continuous pore structure is pursued for increasing performance of energy systems. Focused studies on understanding and controlling physical parameters – architecture design, local chemistry, and devising robust analysis methods have led to record performance of surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). Developed SERS sensors are not only able to fingerprint individual molecules but also identify and quantify chemical signatures in complex biological backgrounds at trace analyte concentrations. These architectures are being developed as low cost diagnostic devices. These advances lead us toward a future where telemedicine can play an important role in healthcare.