Small-scale fluidics: from soft matter to bio-engineering

Small scale/bio fluidics is a highly interdisciplinary field that involves the study and control of mass-momentum-heat-species transport processes in fluid/particle/drop/bubbles/cell-related fundamental phenomena. These phenomena occur typically across multiple length and time scales and also within the human body and biological tissue down to the subcellular level, as well as artificially engineered devices in-vitro. Research in this area is advancing rapidly and applications are proliferating, especially in the life/health sciences and biotechnology, chemical sensing, cosmetics, oil extraction, food industry, air purification, to cite a few. In order to design and optimize microfluidics-based devices for these applications, it becomes essential to understand the underlying flow physics and interfacial phenomena at small scales. The different teams are directly or indirectly linked with the topic of soft matter (colloids, drops/bubbles, wetting, interface dynamics, atomization etc.) and bio-fluidics (endothelium mimicking real blood vessels, migrating cancer/tumor cells through capillary microvasculature, paper-and-pencil based microfluidics or microvascular physiology and flow instabilities).