The 2025 Microfluidics Professional Course is designed as a crash course for industrial researchers with little or no experience in the microfluidics field. It is open to international attendees and will include 3 days of morning lectures and afternoon labs. The 2025 course will fully utilize several new scale-up fabrication technologies in our new state of the art cleanroom. The course will include morning lectures given by University of Toronto, Toronto Metropolitan University, and York University leading microfluidics researchers, spanned across 3 days covering fundamentals of microfluidics, the latest micro-fabrication techniques, as well as focused application lectures. The afternoons will be spent inside the facility doing hands-on lab training with our expert staff and will cover various microfabrication techniques including device design, prototyping of elastomeric devices, small-scale fabrication of thermoplastic devices, scale-up fabrication for commercialization using injection molding, cell/tissue culturing/loading, and advanced imaging techniques for validating and carrying out on-chip experiments. At the end of the course, you will have been exposed to a variety of the latest research being carried out using microfluidics platforms as well as utilized the latest microfabrication instrumentation to manufacture your own chip and use it in a targeted application.
Morning lecture topics:
- Introduction to microfluidics
- Prototyping and scale-up fabrication
- Advanced microfabrication for biomedical devices
- Fluid mechanics and microfluidic flow
- Machine learning and microfluidics
- Perfusable vasculature for Organ-on-a-Chip Engineering
- Patenting for a Microfluidic Researcher
- Organisms and Organs-on-a-Chip as disease models and drug test beds
Afternoon hands-on labs:
- Photo-lithography
- Soft-lithography
- Thermal embossing/bonding
- Injection molding
- Roll-2-Roll Coating
- Milling
- 3D printing (and 2-photon 3D printing)
- Confocal and light sheet microscopy
- 3D Bioprinting
- Atomic Force Microscopy
Questions?
Contact Dan Voicu at dan.voicu@utoronto.ca