Kristen C
- Research Program Mentor
PhD Doctor of Philosophy candidate
Expertise
Bioengineering, microfluidics & microfabrication, medical devices, cancer biology, computational image processing, computational data analysis
Project ideas
Designing a new microfluidic device
Human cells are really small — 10 of them could fit across the width of just one of your hairs! This makes them really hard to study because it's difficult and slow to isolate just one cell at a time to measure. That's where microfluidics comes in — the idea is to build tiny devices that are a similar size to those cells, which lets us measure a lot of cells very quickly. In this project, you will learn about the different types of microfluidic devices and how we can design devices that accomplish a variety of different tasks (for example — cell sorting, measuring cell size, or tagging the cell with a special label). Then, you will use Computer-Aided Design (CAD) to design your own microfluidic device that can be used to manipulate and measure cells for an experiment of your own design.