Dr. Atreya has worked in the area of printed biodegradable electronics for precision agriculture and soil monitoring. In particular, he developed a novel printed sensor to characterize microbial decomposition of organic matter in soil. These sensors have now been deployed around the world as an effort to correlate their signal response with more conventional soil health measurements. He plans to continue to investigate the design, fabrication, and use of products and systems architected from naturally derived materials which can often impart interesting properties to a product, such as biodegradability, recyclability, and stimuli-responsiveness, which are crucial to sustainability efforts. Such a combination of emergent properties is necessary with the world trending towards distributed sensing and actuation in all applications ranging from environmental monitoring to tangible interfaces to personal medicine, making disposability and obsolescence here to stay. In addition, Dr. Atreya is interested in the design of accessibility devices, especially such that users with disabilities and/or chronic illnesses can continue to pursue their hobbies or crafts. He is also interested in design education, especially in the teaching of low-fidelity prototyping in the era of pervasive 3D printing.
keywords
Printed and solution-processed electronics, naturally derived and biodegradable materials, Internet of things (IoT) and distributed sensing, novel fabrication techniques, accessibility, low-fidelity prototyping
