Digital Microfluidics for Chemistry, Biology, and Medicine

Digital microfluidics is a fluid-handling technique in which droplets are manipulated by electrostatic forces on an array of electrodes coated with a hydrophobic insulator. In contrast to the more common format of microchannel-based fluidics, digital microfluidics is uniquely well-suited for carrying out sequential chemical processing steps in multiple samples in parallel. This talk will cover my group's recent work applying digital microfluidics to problems in chemistry, biology, and medicine, including parallel-scale organic synthesis and sample analysis, integrated cell culture and analysis, and methods for handling tiny clinical samples for rapid quantification of diagnostic biomarkers. These examples and others suggest that digital microfluidics is emerging as a useful new tool for sample preparation and analysis, and may eventually play an important role in the next generation of laboratory methods, across many different disciplines.