What Facilities and Collaboration Opportunities Does the Caltech MEMS Lab Offer?

The Caltech MEMS Lab is a 7,000-square-foot facility dedicated entirely to biomedical devices and MEMS/NEMS research, built and led by Professor Yu-Chong Tai. It houses a roughly 3,000-square-foot clean room, a CAD lab, and several measurement/metrology labs, and it supports graduate students, postdocs, visiting scholars, and industrial members. Collaboration is a core part of how the lab operates: Professor Tai works with physicians and biologists from institutions such as UCSF, USC, and UCLA, as well as industry partners, to develop integrated implants and other biomedical devices.

What the facility includes

The lab was purpose-built for microdevice fabrication and testing rather than adapted from general-purpose space. According to the lab's own description, its main components are:

This mix matters if you are evaluating whether the lab can support a project end to end: design happens in the CAD lab, fabrication in the clean room, and verification in the metrology labs.

Who the lab supports

The lab states that it supports four groups of people working on innovative devices:

• Graduate students — the primary research workforce
• Postdocs — advanced research roles
• Visiting scholars — external academics spending time at Caltech
• Industrial members — company-affiliated participants

The devices developed in this environment have included neural chips, micro implants, drug delivery devices, micromotors, microphones, micro relays, micro power generators, micro valves, and micro pumps.

Research areas open to collaboration

Professor Tai's group has run a major program in miniature and micro implants for roughly two decades. Specific areas where external collaboration is documented include:

• Cortical, retinal, and spinal implants based on parylene MEMS technology
• HPLC-on-a-chip — described as the first complete high-performance liquid chromatography system on a chip for total biochemical analysis
• Blood labs-on-a-chip and microfluidics
• Wireless micro drug delivery
• Circulating tumor cell enrichment and stem cell treatment of age-related macular disease (funded by the California Government, CIRM project)
• MEMS system integration examples such as smart MEMS surfaces for drag reduction in turbulence, MEMS for delta-wing aerodynamic control, and MEMS-maneuvered UAVs

Earlier work covered active fluid sensing and control, including pressure sensors, shear-stress sensors, hot-wire anemometers, flexible sensor skins, magnetic actuators, and rubber-balloon actuators.

How collaboration typically works

The lab's model is explicitly interdisciplinary. Professor Tai collaborates with medical doctors and biologists — the lab names UCSF, USC, and UCLA as examples — alongside industry partners, to develop integrated implants. That means a clinically or biologically motivated project is usually paired with the lab's fabrication and microdevice expertise rather than handled by either side alone.

If you are considering a collaboration, the practical starting point is to identify which side of that pairing you bring:

• Clinical or biological expertise (a medical need, animal or cell models, clinical context) — pairs with the lab's device fabrication
• Engineering or materials expertise — pairs with the lab's biomedical application focus
• Industry participation — the lab lists industrial members as a supported category

For publication history and a fuller picture of prior projects, the lab points to its Publications page.

What is not specified here

The lab's page does not state application procedures, fees, membership terms, or eligibility requirements for visiting scholars and industrial members. Those details would need to come from direct contact with the lab rather than from the facility description itself.