Biography

PhD Candidate | Aspiring Researcher | Advocates in Sustainability | Future Educator | Biosensing | Carbon Capture

Munirah is currently pursuing her PhD in UNSW on metal-organic framework (MOF) coatings for encapsulations and separations. She received her BE (Hons) in Chemical Engineering the same university in 2016. During her honours year, she studied multi-enzyme biocatalytic membrane modifications using TiO2 nanoparticles for CO2 capture applications. Previously, she was involved in developing gas-liquid contactor during her undergraduate internship programme. Her research interests are in MOF coating applications in biosensors and drug-delivery.

Her PhD project has end user application as a biosensor, a commercial device that quantifies the amount of target analyte such as glucose, using biomolecules such as enzymes (eg. glucose sensor). Specifically in the research laboratory, she develops a type of surface coating with the enzymes to increase its stability and enhance its performance as biosensor. With the current glucose sensing device that requires patient to prick their fingers to draw blood, she hopes that that the surface coating can improve the performance that the end product will be non-invasive and can be used with external fluid such as sweat, tears or urine instead of blood. Besides that, she needs to engineer the fabrication technique for one step towards commercialization.

Her recent work is on fabricating a simple paper-based sensor using enzyme-MOF film to study its characteristic, stability and properties. This paper is presented in CHEMECA 2018 and as a poster in 10^th International Nanomedicine Conference 2019. At the current stage, there is a need to study the effect of changing the coating type and understanding the fundamental mechanism of analyte diffusion in this coating. The final stage of the project is to apply the synthesis method on electrochemical based sensor and study its feasibility and compatibility.