Laurie Locascio at yearly Bergveldlecture

Friday January 16, at 4 PM (Spiegel 1), Laurie Locascio of the “National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)”/USA, will speak at the yearly Bergveldlecture . Dr. Locascio is an international renowned researcher in the area of microfluidics, biosensors en sensor/flow systems. An abstract of her lecture is included.

The yearly Bergveldlecture is an initiative from the BIOS/Lab-on-a-Chip groep. For more information you can contact Jan Eijkel (j.c.t.eijkel@utwente.nl).

“Microfluidics as a tool to enable research and discovery in the life sciences”, lecture by Laurie Locascio, Spiegel 1, Friday January 16, 2009, 16.00
The field of microfluidics brings the promise of discovery to modern biology as its applications span and enable technologically complex measurements such as high throughput sequencing and single cell assays. In the past several years, our research group has focused on the development of microfluidic systems that advance bioanalytical measurement capabilities and that include: powerful pre-concentration and separation methods for DNA, RNA and proteins based on a novel technique called Temperature Gradient Focusing (TGF); methods for controlling spatial chemical gradients without convective flow for studying cell motility; dieelctrophoretic methods for cellular isolation and identification; and multi-step integrated approaches to whole transcriptome analysis at the single cell level. This presentation will describe these new technologies as well as some of the other advances that we have made in recent years that have impacted our research in the life sciences. All of these techniques rely on microfluidics as the critical enabling platform.