William Grover
University of California-Riverside, CA·Biomedical Engineering
Many things biologists study live in liquid: cells, microorganisms, fish embryos, insect larvae, sprouting seeds, hydrogels and pills. Weighing them on an ordinary laboratory balance is hard or impossible while they sit in fluid.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Engineering
Chemistry
- Topics
vibrating tube sensor
resonance frequency
mass measurement
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2027
What they work on
- Develop a low-cost vibrating tube sensor, a glass tube shaken at its resonance frequency, that records the mass of a millimeter-sized biosample in fluid as a shift in that frequency.
- Build an automated instrument that continuously monitors the mass, volume and density of microgram-sized biosamples in any liquid, with nanogram-scale resolution, over any chosen timescale.
- Refine the instrument using feedback from five UC Riverside beta-testing labs that apply it in toxicology, biomaterials, drug delivery, entomology and plant science.
- Release a free, open-source design that other researchers can replicate, with undergraduates helping build the beta units.
More about the research
Their mass also changes in meaningful ways over time. An organism gains mass as it grows, and a biodegradable material loses mass as it dissolves. Tracking those changes by hand is slow and labor-intensive, which leaves a gap in what researchers can measure.
Why it matters
Biologists studying growth, toxicity, drug release or material breakdown often cannot easily weigh small samples that live in liquid. An open, low-cost instrument that tracks mass and density automatically could let labs in toxicology, drug delivery, entomology and plant science measure these changes continuously. Because the design is meant to be replicable and suitable for future commercial production, many labs could build or eventually buy it.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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University of Maine, ME·Materials Science
Build functional microfluidic prototypes using industrial-scale, roll-to-roll cast channel systems produced with Maine-based paper manufacturing infrastructure.
Jian-Young Wu
Georgetown University, DC·Neuroscience
Test whether patterned pinhole illuminators, built from glass-disk pinhole patterns or microlens arrays, reduce background light and strengthen calcium signals in brain tissue densely labeled with the calcium sensor GCaMP6f.
Eric Hutton
University of Colorado Boulder, CO·Earth & Environmental Science
Design and build an affordable, modular open-source hardware–firmware system so geomorphology labs around the world can make uniform measurements and produce reproducible data.
The school
University of California-Riverside: 21 labs on PI Pages, $232M a year on research, 328 research doctorates a year.
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