How does a guy from Detroit wind up designing optical sensor arrays?
When I first left Detroit, I went to Stony Brook. I received a PhD in what at the time was called chemical biology, but it’s not what we call chemical biology today. It was basically a program that included both pharmacology and organic chemistry. Then I worked as a postdoc with George Whitesides while he was at MIT. I was working in the field of immobilized enzymes, which involved attaching enzymes to solid supports. When I started my academic career here at Tufts, I continued working in that area. I started reading about sensors and realized that the field needed organic chemists who understood how to attach things to surfaces. So, I started developing basic methods for attaching molecules to surfaces. For example, we were the first group to use the avidin-biotin method for making sensors back in the mid-1980s. I hooked up with some people who were developing optical sensors at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. They were interested in attaching dyes to optical fibers. I got inv
