BME Faculty Search Seminar – Freeman Lan

Revolutionizing biological discovery through ultrahigh-throughput experimentation

Dr. Freeman Lan,

Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Winsconsin-Madison

Biological assays have for decades been carried out primarily in reaction tubes and microtiter plates, which are low throughput and difficult to scale. Microfluidics technology can overcome this limitation through miniaturization of reaction volumes and efficient scaling of liquid handling. I will describe my work pioneering droplet microfluidics as a platform to conduct biological assays at ultrahigh-throughput (>10,000 assays per run) and how I am now applying this technology to study microbial systems. I show that ultrahigh-throughput experimentation can rapidly generate large amounts of data and bring fresh insights that would previously be unattainable using traditional methods. Given our rapidly increasing capacity to analyze large scale data through advances in machine learning, ultrahigh-throughput experimentation will become an important way of conducting biological research in the future.

Talk will be in-person and virtual, see information below.