This is a past event.

Environmental Engineering Graduate Seminar

Aytug Gencoglu, Assistant Professor, Chemical Engineering, Michigan Tech

Summary: Microfluidics technology is mostly developed and used for life sciences applications. Bioparticles from proteins to spheroids can be manipulated by a combination of fluid flow, electric fields, and other physical phenomena in microfluidic systems. This talk will focus on two classes of techniques: Electrokinetics and droplet microfluidics. Electrokinetic applications have been used to identify and sort cells without biochemical markers solely based on their responses to electric field, which depend on the inherent properties of the cells. The same phenomena can also concentrate cells and biomolecules as a preparation step. 
“Droplet microfluidics” refers to the splitting of a liquid phase into precisely sized droplets in microfluidic channels. This technique has been used to encapsulate single cells for parallelized experiments on many individual cells. Individual droplets can also act as microreactors, possibly for parallelized experiments. One application is droplet PCR (dPCR), where data is collected in a digital manner, based on positive/negative status of individual PCR droplets. dPCR has some advantages which are valuable in analyzing “messy” samples with significant interfering species. 
Both electrokinetics and dPCR are useful for monitoring applications where the existence or proliferation of species of concern need to be monitored in the presence of other species.

Bio: Dr. Aytuğ Gençoğlu (he/him) received his BS in Chemical Engineering from Istanbul Technical University in 2003. He also received an MS in Molecular Biology, Genetics and Biotechnology from Istanbul Technical University in 2005, and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Michigan Technological University in 2012. In MTU, he studied electrochemical reactions, and electric field-driven ion movement in microfluidic devices. He later worked on label-free separation and identification of living cells in microfluidic devices, both in academia and a startup company. He has also worked on development and commercial sustaining of microfluidic chips at a commercial scale in Bio-Rad Laboratories. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering in MTU.