This week, Professor Balpreet S. Ahluwalia was invited by the European Commission Council to participate in the talk Frontier research to fight COVID-19. Prof. Ahluwalia presented his photonic chip as a tool that enables the study of COVID-19, and how this technology has already been used by collaborators in Leibniz-IPHT, Germany, to image the virus. However, to make things more impressive: this was done using a 3D printed microscope with a price tag below EUR 1000!
The talk was done in the context of the online event European Research and Innovation Days held between 22 and 24 of September and featured 4 researchers of different fields around questions such as how can technology development help in tackling the pandemic? and what have we learned about our societies, institutions, governance, etc. from the current crisis?
A more detailed description of the talk is available at this link.
To know more about the usage of the chip and the 3D printed microscopes, we invite you to read the pre-printed version of the manuscript here where the authors explain in detail how they did it.