Armani is interested in nonlinear materials and integrated optical devices, which are used in everything from diagnostics to telecommunications.[7] When she was offered her position at University of Southern California, she delivered a hand-written acceptance letter to Yannis C. Yortsos.[8] She is director of the W. M. Keck Photonics Cleanroom and John D. O’Brien Nanofabrication Laboratory.[7] From 2010 to 2017, she was the Fluor Early Career Chair of Engineering, and in 2017, she was appointed the Ray Irani Chair in Chemical Engineering and Materials Science.[9] She has appointments in Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Biomedical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Chemistry.
Her research group is highly interdisciplinary, working from the fundamentals of material discovery and optics to applications in integrated optics and diagnostics. She used gold nanoparticles to create low power frequency combs, which can be used as high precision light sources in fields such as cybersecurity, chemical sensing and GPS.[10] The gold nanoparticles increase the light that circulates in the device, allowing the microlaser to operate at a range of wavelengths at high intensity.[11][12] She also works on hybrid organic-inorganic photonics which combine organic materials with conventional integrated photonic devices.[13] In this work, she invented several new organic small molecules to improve optical device performance for Raman lasers and frequency comb generation.[14] She invented a photo-responsive material and created a flexible indicator from a tri-layer polymer-based device, which changes colour when exposed to UV light.[13][15] The colour change is due to the polymer irreversibly cleaving when exposed to UV-light. This device could be used in preventive healthcare to protect against skin cancer.[16][10] She was supported by the Office of Naval Research to develop an interferometric optical biosensor.[17] The proposed biosensor is able to detect DNA and bacteria.[17] She developed a high-resolution polarimetric elastography instrument to characterise the mechanical properties of visco-elastic materials.[18][19] This has been used to study the extracellular matrixinpancreatic tissue and porcine tissue.[20][21]
Armani is interested in using optical devices for epigenetic investigations, and has developed a label-free sensor that can detect and quantify DNA methylation.[22] The sensor incorporates a rare-earth element optical cavity to form a nanolaser.[22] The heterodyned nanolaser sensors can be used to diagnose ovarian cancer as they are sensitive to RASSF1A and BRCA1 promoters.[22] They compliment their experimental work with finite element method and finite-difference time-domain method modelling.[3] In 2018 she announced a portable malaria screening device that can be used for rapid screening.[23][24] The device uses a 633 nm laser to study hemozoin, a magnetic insoluble nanocrystal that forms when heme aggregates.[23] The hemozoin nanoparticles strongly scatter light and can be moved using a magnet, which allows them to be identified by monitoring the intensity of light that passes through a sample.[23]
Her lab group are not only involved with research, but actively engaged with the community, running engineering festivals, lab parties and sports days.[25][26] Armani is a Fellow of SPIE and Optica (formerly OSA), and has been a visiting lecturer of both societies since in 2009.[13] She is the faculty advisor for the student chapters of SPIE and Optica at USC.[4] She spent 2015 on sabbatical as a Northrop Grumman faculty fellow.[4]
^Armani, Andrea M.; Hudnut, Alexa W. (2018-02-19). "High-resolution optical polarimetric elastography for measuring the mechanical properties of tissue". In Sampson, David D.; Larin, Kirill V. (eds.). Optical Elastography and Tissue Biomechanics V. Vol. 10496. International Society for Optics and Photonics. p. 6. Bibcode:2018SPIE10496E..06H. doi:10.1117/12.2285443. ISBN9781510614772. S2CID139266255.
