ARCS Scholar alum Taryn Imamura is a 5th year PhD student in mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Her PhD research focuses on creating microscopic robots, using DNA as structural building material. She aims to use these microrobots for biomedical applications and minimally invasive medical therapies.

At ~ 20 microns in size, these “micro-swimmers” are about the size of a red blood cell and can swim through constricted, delicate environments such as human capillaries.

One of the future applications Imamura envisions for her work is using micro swimmers for targeted cargo delivery. For example, using micro swimmers to navigate to a particular location in the body, where in response to biochemical or physical signals, they release their cargo to provide treatment.

“These micro swimmers are exceptionally small, and our goal is to one day navigate them through the delicate and restricted channels of the human body,” Imamura explains. When asked why it is advantageous to build micro robots with DNA, she says “We want our micro robots to be biocompatible so they don’t interact poorly with the human body. DNA is about as biocompatible as it gets. If designed carefully, DNA nanostructures are also highly programmable and highly sensitive to signal within the human body,” Imamura says. “So by using DNA as a subcomponent of the micro robot, we can take advantage of its programmability and material properties.”

Imamura explains how using programmable, smart materials can make her micro robots more “physically intelligent.”

“At the microbe scale, there’s no room for the microprocessors or chips that tell larger robots what to do. If we want our microrobots to accomplish tasks autonomously, all of that intelligence needs to be built into the robot’s physical structure. Using DNA as a subcomponent of our robots is an exciting method for enhancing their physical intelligence,” Imamura says.

According to Imamura, this design concept of using biomolecules to construct miniscule robots can be extended further to use other biological materials such as RNA, or proteins. “Nature is very good at making intricate, responsive structures from a variety of biological materials. There is a lot of inspiration we can draw from what nature does every day,” she says.

Imamura was introduced to academic research while studying engineering physics at Stanford University. She later switched disciplines to mechanical engineering partially because she found “the breadth of problems I could get to solve exciting. I wanted to do research that could help my community and I thought it was exciting that I could design and build robotic systems that hadn’t existed before and find new applications for them that could help people.”

She is preparing to defend her thesis in September of this year. After completing her PhD she plans to move to the San Francisco Bay area and is now applying to post-doc positions at national labs. “There’s a lot of interesting research on active materials and responsive biopolymers happening right now,” Imamura says. “Learning about the materials available to me is a great way to start.”

Imamura has appreciated both the financial and social support from ARCS Pittsburgh chapter. She moved to Pittsburgh at the height of the pandemic. “It was not an easy time to be moving to a new city. ARCS was a fantastic community of people. They helped me settle in those first months and made Pittsburgh feel more friendly.”

You can read Imamura’s most recent research publication to learn more.