Topic: Digital Microfluidic Biochips: From Manipulating Droplets to Quantitative Gene-Expression Analysis
Speaker: Prof. Krishnendu Chakrabarty, Duke University
Time: Sep 27, 11:00
Venue: E708 New Main Building
Abstract:
Advances in microfluidics have led to the emergence of biochips for automating laboratory procedures in molecular biology. These devices enable the precise control of nanoliter volumes of biochemical samples and reagents. As a result, new biomedical applications and markets (e.g., high-throughout DNA sequencing, portable and point-of-care clinical diagnostics, and protein crystallization for drug discovery) are opening up for integrated circuits and miniaturized electronic systems.
This lecture will first introduce digital microfludic biochips based on electrowetting-on-dielectric, describe market drivers such as DNA sequencing and clinical diagnostics, and highlight recent commercialization success stories. The audience will next learn about design automation and dynamic reconfiguration aspects of microfluidic biochips. Synthesis tools will be described to map assay protocols from the lab bench to a droplet-based microfluidic platform and generate an optimized schedule of bioassay operations, the binding of assay operations to functional units, and the layout and droplet-flow paths for the biochip. The role of the digital microfluidic platform as a “programmable and reconfigurable processor” for biochemical applications will be highlighted. The speaker will also describe sensor-driven on-chip error recovery through cyberphysical system integration.
Finally, the speaker will highlight recent advances in utilizing cyberphysical integration for quantitative gene-expression analysis and single-cell analysis. This framework is an attempt to cross the formidable barrier that separates biochip engineering from mainstream microbiology research. Today’s microfluidics design-automation (“synthesis”) techniques do a lot more than on-chip droplet manipulation; they incorporate the myriad complexities of biomolecular protocols and they are therefore expected to make a positive impact on biochemistry/microbiology research.
Bio of the Speaker:
Krishnendu Chakrabarty received the B. Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, in 1990, and the M.S.E. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1992 and 1995, respectively. He was Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University during 1995-1998. He is now the William H. Younger Distinguished Professor and Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Professor of Computer Science at Duke University. Prof. Chakrabarty is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER award (1999), the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator award (2001), the Humboldt Research Award (2013), the IEEE Transactions on CAD Donald O. Pederson Best Paper Award (2015), the ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems Best Paper Award (2017) and over a dozen best paper awards at major IEEE conferences. He is also a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award (2015) and the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Charles A. Desoer Technical Achievement Award (2017).
Prof. Chakrabarty’s current research projects include: design-for-testability of integrated circuits and systems; microfluidic biochips; data analytics for fault diagnosis, failure prediction, and hardware security. He is a Fellow of ACM, a Fellow of IEEE, and a Golden Core Member of the IEEE Computer Society. Prof. Chakrabarty served as the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Design & Test of Computers during 2010-2012 and ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems during 2010-2015. Currently he serves as the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems.
School of Electronic and Information Technology
