Biologically Inspired Micro- and Nanofluidic Systems for Biomedical Applications

Major advances in science and engineering have greatly enhanced our understanding of the fundamental principles that nature uses to build, control, and manipulate living systems. These insights into the inner workings of nature offer unique opportunities to develop new engineering principles inspired by biological systems and utilize them to create devices and materials that may potentially lead to transformative breakthroughs in biomedicine. This talk will present multidisciplinary efforts directed towards the development of biomedical micro- and nanofluidic systems inspired by the human body. Specifically, I will talk about i) a bioinspired microsystem that reproduces the key structure, dynamic mechanical activity, and complex organ-level functionality of the living human lung, ii) a microengineered model of human small airways and acoustically detectable cellular-level lung injury, and iii) tunable elastomeric nanochannels for nanofluidic manipulation of nanoparticles, DNA, and polymeric nanostructures.

Speaker: Dan Dongeun Huh, Harvard University and Harvard Medical School

Room 106