Microfluidics for Single Cell Biology

Description:
Microfluidics has revolutionized single-cell biology with their small volume, scalability, and throughput. While single-cell RNA-seq and ATAC-seq dominate most single-cell measurements due to the availability of commercial platforms, the potential of microfluidics technologies is far-reaching. They can be used to probe all axes from genotype to phenotype, cell-cell interactions, cellular response to stimuli, and many more. This symposium will present cutting-edge microfluidic technologies to analyze various facets of single-cell biology, including secretome, proteome, enzyme activities, cell-cell interactions, pathogen-cell interactions, etc. We will also discuss strategies to democratize microfluidic technologies to lower the technical barrier for end-users and non-experts.

Speaker: Hee-Sun Han - University of Illinois
Professor Han obtained her B.S. degree in Chemistry at Seoul National University, Korea, where she graduated summa cum laude as a Valedictorian. She then moved to Cambridge, USA, to pursue graduate work in Physical Chemistry at MIT as a Samsung and KASF fellow. Under the guidance of Prof. Moungi G. Bawendi, she developed quantum dot-based bioimaging methods. For postdoctoral training, she joined Prof. David A. Weitz’s group at Harvard, where she developed a drop-based microfluidic platform for high throughput genome sequencing. Han is currently the Mark A. Pytosh Scholar and Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Her group develops and implements new imaging- and microfluidics-based bioanalytical platforms to unveil molecular and cellular mechanisms driving system-level functions. She received several awards and recognitions, including the Johnson & Johnson WiSTEM2D award for Science and NIH Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award.