2017 FRED Award helped Skrabalak ‘dream big’
With a new paper out and a patent in the pipeline, 2017 Cottrell FRED (Frontiers in Research Excellence and Discovery) Award recipient Sara Skrabalak says her award has achieved its intended effect: “Dream big and take risks with your science.”
Skrabalak and her research group at Indiana University Bloomington are developing nanomaterial “fingerprints” that can be used to secure many different objects against counterfeiting. “We are using metal nanomaterials to create covert tags on objects that would be incredibly difficult for counterfeiters to duplicate but easy for us to fabricate and authenticate,” she said.
“I am especially interested applying this technology to secure electronic components because there are huge security risks,” Skrabalak said. Counterfeit electronics might include failure-prone or malicious components that could cause security breaches, representing the potential for significant economic losses.
The new paper details how this covert anticounterfeit platform uses plasmonic nanoparticles to create physically unclonable functions with high encoding capacity.
Skrabalak said her FRED award has allowed her to establish a new direction in her research group. She had published a paper before her award on the fundamental insights into these materials for chemical sensing, a complementary part of the project, but now she is integrating that research into the anticounterfeiting work.
A media release from RCSA on her FRED award brought her research to the attention of IN3, the Indiana Innovation Institute, which works with academia, industry and government to create a hub of national security innovation to solve critical defense priorities. Skrabalak’s work was included in a multi-university grant focused on securing electronic components, and the collaboration brought in David Crandall of Indiana University’s Computer Science Department to apply machine learning methods for the authentication of her tags, creating a platform for rapid authentication.
“We can record vast amounts of data, but we need to access and process it rapidly,” Skrabalak said. “The collaboration that FRED enabled allowed us to realize and demonstrate the idea with a much higher degree of sophistication than I could have alone.”
As her FRED award funding is wrapping up, the project is now one of five fully established research areas for her lab, with two graduate students and one undergrad now working on it. Skrabalak is currently exploring licensing directions for the platform and having conversations with industry leaders to see how it might address their needs, or how it might need to be modified to do so.
Skrabalak said support from RCSA has been instrumental throughout her career.
While her original Cottrell Scholar award in 2012 “validated the direction my research was going,” the FRED award allowed her to undertake a project that was “a bit risky but with potential for larger rewards.”
