Light, electronics, and the body.
My work centers on making optical sensing small, cheap, and tunable enough to live inside consumer devices — and making physiological signals legible enough to act on.
Voltage-tunable optics for spectroscopic sensing
I work in the Drexel Optics & NanoPhotonics+ Lab under Dr. Adam Fontecchio, developing holographic polymer-dispersed liquid crystal (HPDLC) filters for hyperspectral imaging. By modulating an external voltage, the diffraction condition of the HPDLC grating shifts, electronically scanning a narrow passband across the NIR window with no moving parts.
The goal is deceptively simple: replace the bulky monochromators and broadband sources of traditional NIR spectroscopy with a thin film, a driver, and a photodiode.
Sugar Insight through Filter Technology
SIFT is a non-invasive optical glucose monitor built on HPDLC filters. The sensor steers a tunable NIR passband across the glucose absorption bands between 480nm and 2400nm, extracts the differential signal, and maps it to interstitial glucose concentration.
The design target: continuous glucose monitoring without needles, without consumables, and at a bill of materials that a teenager in Caracas can afford.
Peer-reviewed work
Classification of sympathetic nervous system arousal from electrodermal activity: a systematic review of multimodal biosignal approaches
Across 68 studies, we survey how electrodermal activity is paired with HRV, EEG, respiration, and motion to classify sympathetic arousal. We examine feature engineering choices, model families, and the reproducibility gap between lab-grade and wearable-grade signals — and argue for standardized reporting of arousal classification benchmarks.
DOI: 10.3390/s26051584 →The toolkit
The range is wide on purpose — a glucose monitor needs optics, a driver board, a BLE stack, and a signal-processing pipeline before anyone sees a number.