DR. NISHA RANI AGARWAL

Assistant Professor

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Research expertise: Atomic Force Microscopy, Intermodulation techniques, Vibrational Spectroscopy, Raman and Infra-red, Plasmonic enhancement, Nanoscale characterization, surface and interface science, surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, nanostructured devices, soft materials

Nisha Agarwal received her PhD from Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy in 2013 as an Erasmus scholar working in the field of nanotechnology and materials science focusing on Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS). She further pursued 5 years of post-doctoral research at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova, Italy; Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden and McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada broadening her expertise in non-linear microscopy with applications in plasmonics, pharmaceutical and biological sectors, development of super-resolution techniques and paper-based point-of-care diagnostics. She currently holds an Assistant Professor position in Physics, Faculty of Science at University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Oshawa, Canada.

Her main research interests lie in innovation and development of new emerging high-resolution (nanoscale regime) technologies and integrating it with Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) and Raman spectroscopy. The technology is applied to solving real-world problems such as biological study of neurological disorders, Alzheimers and Parkinson’e disease; mitochondrial dysfunctional studies in yeast cells as a model for Alzheimers, study of metastasis in colo-rectal cancer cells and environmental problems. Additionally, the applications extend to understanding physical phenomena at the interfaces of nanomaterials, thus building the field of plasmonics.

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