Biography
Philippe A. Passeraub is a new Associate Professor in the Department of Manufacturing Engineering at BYU. He graduated in Microengineering and went on to earn a PhD in Technical Sciences with a thesis entitled “An integrated inductive proximity sensor” at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. He worked in the industry in Switzerland as well as in Liechtenstein, and he did a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins in the Biomedical Engineering Department. He was Associate Professor at the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland since 2004 and joined BYU the summer of 2022. His research specialties focus on microengineering and bioinstrumentation and in particular transducing microsystems, surface additive manufacturing, and medical devices.
Research Interests
My research interest is in Microengineering, the “science of miniaturization”, searching to increase the ratio between the number of functions over a finite volume in a product or a system. To achieve this, design and manufacturing needs to be considered together. New manufacturing process opens the way for embedding new functions. My research focuses on additive manufacturing of microsystems and medical devices (including sensors, biosensors, microfluidic systems, Internet of things, energy harvesting, micro-batteries, as well as open-source and sustainable electronic products). My research methodology includes microsystems design with analytical or numerical models when appropriate, printing-based manufacturing process development, innovative measuring methods, and characterization with high precision instruments. My motivation is multiple and is related to the fact that manufacturing is key for the economic development of nations and the well-being of its citizens. It includes the potential through additive manufacturing processes, of lowering the needed investments for low series production and of widely democratizing production, starting with the distribution of “low-profit” – “high impact” products, to possibly be extended to production, maintenance, and repair of sustainable consumer products.The methods used for the development of this multidisciplinary research include process and technology development (with focus on pad-printing), with empirical studies coupled with design of experiments, modelling when appropriate, as well as design and study of original for the manufacturing of transducer-based microsystems.