Ali Mesbah
University of California-Berkeley, CA·Engineering
Cold plasmas are low-temperature, electrically charged gases that can kill bacteria, help heal wounds, and treat skin or virus infections. They may also assist cancer treatment and modify the surfaces of implants.
- Fields
Engineering
Biomedical Engineering
Computer Science
- Topics
model predictive control
control systems
embedded control
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Develop a multi-objective optimization framework that co-designs the software and hardware of model predictive control (MPC) chips for uncertain nonlinear systems with kilohertz-speed dynamics.
- Develop Bayesian optimization methods that safely adapt MPC-on-a-chip controllers to improve performance when only scarce performance data are available, as in personalized plasma treatment.
- Experimentally demonstrate adaptive MPC-on-a-chip control of a cold atmospheric plasma jet for bacterial disinfection, and release open-source code and computational benchmarks.
More about the research
Small point-of-care plasma devices could bring these treatments to clinics or to communities with few resources. However, a plasma's effect depends on many fast-changing conditions and on the surface being treated. Delivering a safe and effective dose to each patient therefore needs automatic control that can adjust as treatment proceeds.
Why it matters
Personalized, automatically controlled dosing could make portable cold-plasma devices safer and more effective. Uses could include disinfecting bacterial biofilms, treating wounds and skin disease, or treating at the point of care in resource-limited communities. The chip-based adaptive controllers could also carry over to other fast technical systems that need compact, data-efficient control.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Bruno Sinopoli
Arizona State University Campus Immersion, AZ·Engineering
Establish closed-loop stability guarantees for REAP solvers, optimization methods that return a safe, feasible answer even when stopped early, and develop ways to implement them on discrete-time digital hardware.
Andre Bauer
Illinois Institute of Technology, IL·Computer Science
Develop the Cosimo co-simulation framework, coupling existing simulators with live orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes to model autoscaling, load balancing and failure recovery.
Yu She
Purdue University, IN·Engineering
Detect early signs of apple scab, fire blight and powdery mildew in apple orchards using drones carrying multispectral and thermal cameras.
The school
University of California-Berkeley: 46 labs on PI Pages, $1.1B a year on research, 825 research doctorates a year.
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