Sensors Webinar | Thermal Biosensing Methods
the chair
27th Sensors Webinar
Thermal Biosensing Methods
Dear colleagues,
If you are working on biosensors—and many of you are—you will already be familiar with a variety of transducers established using, for example, optical, electronic, electrochemical, and microgravimetric techniques. In this webinar, we will introduce the principle of thermal biosensors, produced, for example, using the heat-transfer method (HTM), which employs temperature gradients and thermal currents to probe biomolecular interactions. In principle, the concept is rather simple: you need a heat source and two thermometers, and you are ready to detect, for example, bacteria, virus particles, or mutations in DNA. Of course, this does not work without bioreceptors, but when a suitable receptor is included, the HTM becomes sensitive to an incredibly broad range of biotargets. There are also receptor-free HTM applications, such as monitoring cell proliferation and evaluating the efficacy of antimicrobials at the cell culture level.
We are grateful to MDPI for organizing this webinar, and a special thanks goes to today’s three speakers: they not only pioneered the basic HTM principle but also continue to advance it toward real-life applications in medical diagnostics, food safety, and environmental monitoring.
I wish you all a pleasant and fruitful webinar.
Best regards,
Patrick Wagner, KU Leuven
Date: 22 October 2025
Time: 3:00 pm CEST | 9:00 am EDT
Webinar ID: 854 7887 2355
Webinar Secretariat: journal.webinar@mdpi.com
Meet the Event Chair
Meet Our Speakers
Dr. Bart van Grinsven
Sensor Engineering Department, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands;
Bart van Grinsven received a masters degree in bioelectronics and nanotechnology from Hasselt University in 2007. Then he was employed by TNO as a development engineer and returned to the BIOSensor group of Hasselt University in 2008. He successfully defended his PhD in physics in July 2012. After working as a post doctoral researcher in the same group he switched to Maastricht University to become a member of the Maastricht Science Programme where he obtained the position of Assistant Professor in 2014. After several years of combining research and education he helped building up the Sensor Engineering Department (SE) as part of the new Faculty of Science and Engineering where he obtained the position of associate professor and department head in 2019.
Prof. Dr. Marloes Peeters
School of Engineering, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK;
Marloes graduated from Eindhoven University of Technology (the Netherlands) with a degree in Chemical Engineering. For my PhD, she moved to Hasslet University in Belgium where she was part of the BIOSensors group of Prof Wagner. After postdoctoral research positions at Hasselt University and Queen Mary Universty of London, she commenced her independent research career at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK in 2015. Marloes became a Professor at Newcastle University in 2023 and at the end of that year, joined the Chemical Engineering department of the University of Manchester as a Chair (Professor) in Engineering Biology. Her research group focuses on the development of advanced functional polymer materials to solve complex healthcare problems such as in the field of biosensors, bioelectronics, and drug delivery. Marloes has been granted five patents on novel biosensor platforms, is a key science communicator, and has won the RSC Macro Group UK Early Career Award in 2024 (awarded to a polymer scientist with great promise for the future).
Prof. Dr. Ronald Thoelen
Institute for Materials Research (IMO), Hasselt University, Diepenbeek, Limburg, Belgium;
Prof. Dr. Ir. Ronald Thoelen is a professor at the Faculty of Engineering Technology of Hasselt University and head of the Biomedical Device Engineering (BDE) group within the Institute for Materials Research (imo-imomec). His research focuses on the design and integration of elec-trical impedance and thermal-based biosensors in microfluidic and lab-on-chip platforms for applications ranging from point-of-care diagnostics to process monitoring. He has developed novel thermal sensing approaches for detecting molecular interactions, monitoring biological processes, and controlling temperature-sensitive microfluidic operations. Prof. Thoelen has led and contributed to numerous national and international projects, advancing biosensing tech-nologies in healthcare, food safety, and environmental monitoring, with a strong focus on translating fundamental concepts into robust, portable diagnostic systems.
Sponsors and Partners
Organizer
This webinar on “Thermal Biosensing Methods” provided a comprehensive overview on techniques that are based on interface thermal resistance and thermal effusivity, unlike calorimetric biosensors. These techniques are novel in a biosensing context and cover a surprisingly wide application range, including the detection of DNA mutations, virus particles and disease biomarkers in body fluids and monitoring cell proliferation and metabolic heat. While thermal methods are robust and powerful, they only require minimum instrumentation and can be easily combined with other transducers to obtain multiparametric information. Not in the least, thermal biosensors are always valuable for generating new insights and unexpected discoveries—stay tuned!
The webinar was hosted via Zoom and required registation to attend. The full recording can be found below. In order to learn about future webinars, you can sign up to our newsletter by clicking "Subscribe" at the top of the page.Feature Papers in Biosensors Section 2025
Special Issue Editors: Prof. Dr. Alexander Star, Prof. Dr Spyridon Kintzios and Prof. Dr. Patrick Wagner
Deadline for manuscript submission: 31 December 2025