Members: skills, interests and project plans:
full members (present every 2 weeks + give journal club at the same meeting):
postdocs:
Šeila Selimović: gradients, multi-layer soft and photo-lithography, droplets, emulsions, cell encapsulation, surfactants (subgroup leader); sselimovic@rics.bwh.harvard.edu
ongoing projects: Cardiac Biosensor (manuscript writing); Vascular tissue in MF device (with Nasim, device development); SafePort (validation and characterization of imaging platform); XCEL (co-organizer, MF team leader, develop MF platform)
MD Anwarul Hasan: shear stress studies; anwer_engg@yahoo.com
ongoing projects:
Sang Bok Kim: lens-less imaging, MEMS; sbkim0327@gmail.com
ongoing projects: high-sensitivity optofluidic pressure sensor
Gi Seok (works with Sang Bok): arysu94@gmail.com
ongoing projects: high-sensitivity optofluidic pressure sensor; yarn syphon
Luiz Eduardo Bertassoni: luizb@mit.edu
ongoing projects:
Mohsen Akbari: makbari@mit.edu
ongoing projects:
Master's / PhD students:
Joao Ribas:
Qi Lang: organ-on-chip device, temperature sensor
Alessia Damilano: SafePort
Bhargava Reddy Morampalli: troponin detection for heart-on-a-chip
undergraduates:
visiting scientists:
guests:
Mehmet Dokmeci: dokmeci1@gmail.com
Ali Tamayol:
Nupura Bhise:
Sub-group meeting:
We will have a sub-group meeting every two weeks, Fridays from 9:00am-12:00pm, and each member will give a 10-15-minute talk. From now on I will cut people off at the 15-minute mark. If there are further issues to discuss, I'll be glad to meet with the presenters afterwards. The room is 101.
Please be on time. You're not forced to attend this meeting, but if you want to be a member, please be professional and show everyone the courtesy of being there on time. You know well in advance when we're meeting, so you can adjust your schedule accordingly. It is rude and unprofessional to miss the meeting without giving any notice (unless it's an emergency, obviously). If you know you won't be able to attend the meeting, please let Ali and me know in a timely fashion.
Before each sub-group meeting, please prepare a concise presentation of your recent work. Please keep your talk (including discussion time) to under 20 minutes. Email your presentation (as ppt or pdf file) to Ali, Gulden, Mehmet and me before the meeting (that is, by 6 pm the day before): khademh@gmail.com, guldencamci@gmail.com, mehmetd@mit.edu, sselimovic@rics.bwh.harvard.edu. Please include one or two background - goal slides and end your presentation with a detailed outline of your experiments for the next two weeks. This is best done in the form of a calendar.
Please focus your presentation on answering the following two questions:
1.) What did I do in the past couple of weeks and what are some of the problems and accomplishments? Give us the most important results, positive or negative; it is not necessary to show every single data point you collected.
2.) What am I planning to do in the next couple of weeks?
Please keep the introduction to your project to one or two slides - we should all be talking to each other outside of the meeting anyways and be familiar with each other's projects. If you're interested in the details of a projects, that's great, keep the questions coming, but be aware that I will interrupt the discussion after 15 minutes. Also, you should be taking notes during the meeting, so you don't have to ask the same questions over and over again.
Remember that these meetings are for your own benefit. Science is best done not in a dungeon by yourself, but in a team. Take this opportunity to discuss issues and potential research questions with your colleague.
Crucial: bring your lab notebooks every time for review and signing. If you have questions about how a notebook should look like, check out the info on the internal webpage or talk to me.
Journal club:
Until further notice, we will have a journal club at every meeting.
From now on, EVERYONE (including short-term subgroup members) will research a fresh-of-the-press paper and be ready to present it at the meeting. Everyone should be prepared to present AT EVERY MEETING. You should e-mail the group the paper(s) you chose at least two days in advance, so we all have enough time to read it and prepare questions. You can give a powerpoint presentation, but you don't have to - that's up to you. Also, I am interested in the key points of the paper, so don't feel obliged to talk about every figure or every equation. Everybody else is expected to have read the paper beforehand, so please formulate your questions accordingly. You might be asked to write a few paragraphs summarizing the paper.
As for the sources, I suggest you read PNAS, Nature, and Science, as well as any fluid mechanics journals. Also check out Lab Chip, Soft Matter and PRL.
When you choose your journal club articles, I suggest restricting your search to microfluidics articles. That means:
- articles explaining the physical phenomena on the micro- and nanoscale
- novel materials and fabrication processes
- novel structural elements
Remember, the point is that everyone who is new to this field can learn something about it. When a paper describes a research project, in which a microfluidic structure was used to test a particular biological system, then often such a paper is not actually a microfluidics paper. Please let me know if you need assistance in your choice of article.