Dr. Kevin Plaxco's research lab at UC Santa Barbara focuses on creating advanced sensors that can measure important molecules and ions in the body in real time. These sensors can provide vital information for monitoring health, particularly for drugs with narrow safety margins and electrolyte levels. This innovative work aims to improve patient care by enabling constant health monitoring through wearable technology.

Dr. Liming Zhang's lab at UC Santa Barbara focuses on developing advanced chemical methods for synthesizing complex organic molecules, particularly in the areas of gold catalysis and carbohydrate chemistry. They are inventing new strategies to create compounds that may be valuable in biomedical research, like unnatural amino acids used in therapeutics. The lab aims to innovate ways to construct glycosidic bonds, which are important in sugar chemistry, and to apply these methods to produce biologically significant structures.