Themes
Six directions, one thesis
The corpus doesn't wander — it deepens. Each theme is a decades-long line of attack on the same underlying problem: keeping electronics alive inside the body.
Hermetic Packaging & Feedthroughs
An implantable device is a promise: nothing leaks in, nothing leaks out, for a decade or more, in warm salt water. This cluster is thirty years of keeping that promise — from the 1…
20 grants — the largest cluster and the corpus's center of gravity
Laser Materials Processing
The craft thread: putting heat exactly where the joint is and nowhere else. It opens in 2000 with a laser fired through the eye of a bonding tool to weld a ribbon without vibration…
11 grants over 25 years, several sole-inventor, three co-assigned with Corning
Implantable Sensors
A therapy device is blind without senses. This cluster gives implants their proprioception: shock-proof piezoelectric accelerometers that let pacemakers feel a patient's motion and…
10 grants from 1997 accelerometers to 2023 pressure sensors; analyte-sensing applications pending
Power Sources
Every battery change is a surgery. This cluster attacks that arithmetic from every direction — wafer-scale packages with power sealed inside, stacked thin-film battery fabrication,…
9 grants: nuclear converters, radioluminescent cells, stacked solid-state batteries, wafer-scale integration
Flow Control & Surgical Navigation
The smallest cluster carries the heaviest human stakes: MEMS-actuated shunt valves for hydrocephalus — closed-loop pressure control for a condition where device failure often means…
3 grants + an active continuation line
Interconnects & Materials
The quiet cluster: corrosion-resistant contact stacks using titanium-niobium, metallization with deliberately tailored (even negative) thermal expansion so joints don't tear themse…
5 grants, four of them sole-inventor