Abstract: Due to its capability of manipulating fluids in a highly controllable manner, capillary-based microfluidics has proven to be powerful in developing novel functional materials. Moreover, microfluidics-enabled products may serve as or construct experimental model systems to facilitate fundamental scientific research and practical technology development. In this talk, I will introduce our research efforts in developing a variety of functional micro-units using capillary microfluidics. Examples include non-spherical microgels, light-tunable liquid crystal drops, colloidosomes with thermally switchable release, chemical-responsive elastic microcapsules, and complex microcapsules for enhanced cargo retention. I will further discuss our perspective on using the microgels and micro-vesicles to address fundamental biomedical problems.   

Bio: Dr. Jing Fan joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at CCNY as an assistant professor in January 2016. Her current research interests include a variety of topics in complex fluids and soft materials, such as the coupling of transport processes in biological tissues, design and fabrication of functional porous materials, enhanced oil recovery and flood conformance control, advanced materials for biomedical and optical applications, physics and applications of microfluidics, foam and emulsion physics, and synthesis of functional particulate materials. Prior to joining CCNY, Dr. Fan was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University working on microfluidics for materials production, multiphase flow in porous media, and many other topics related to the dynamics of complex fluids. Her PhD study in The University of Hong Kong was about multiscale modeling as well as computational heat transfer and fluid dynamics.