It’s the ‘lab-on-a-chip’ model
With little more than a conventional photocopier and transparency film, anyone can build a functional microfluidic chip. A local Cambridge high school physics teacher invented the process; now, thanks to a new undergraduate teaching lab at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), students will be able to explore microfluidics and its applications. The Microfluidics Lab, developed by Anas Chalah, director of instructional technology at SEAS, takes advantage of a simple but ingenious new method of creating lab-on-a-chip devices that are quick to produce, affordable, and reusable. (Microfluidic devices are used to study liquids at the microliter scale — such as a few drops of blood from a patient — while taking advantage of some fluid behaviors that take place only at the micro-scale.) Chalah is excited — contagiously so — about the lab’s potential to serve students from all areas of science and engineering. “Harvard University shaped the emergence of the field...