This year's combined 13th International Conference on Surface and Colloid Science of the International Association of Colloid and Interface Scientists, and the 83rd Colloid and Surface Science Symposium was held at Columbia University in New York City. Now that I've gotten the giant name of this conference out of the way, I'd like to talk about some highlights.
This year's even drew over 1100 attendees—a good turnout in most of the attendees' opinions. Because Biomicrofluidics was sponsoring the "Electrokinetics & Microfluidics" sessions, here are a couple of highlights from that session:
Monday morning, Howard A. Stone began the session to a crowded room with his lecture on "Multiphase Flows in Confined Systems." Dr. Stone explored the idea of using microfluidic approaches in multiphase hydrodynamics in confined systems and cellular-scale hydrodynamics.
Other highlights from the day included a lecture on "Droplet Breakup in Flow-Focusing Geometries," by Carnegie Mellon's Shelley Anna—who was also the co-organizer of that morning's session. The other organizer—Leslie Yeo, Monash University and editor of Biomicrofluidics—spoke next about "Microfluidic Interfacial Destabilization and Atomization," in which he described a "10 nanometer earthquake wave" with an acceleration at the surface reaching 107 g's. He spoke briefly about some of the future applications for the research, including drug delivery and encapsulation, chip-based spectrometry, and "soft" molecular printing.
Tuesday afternoon's session started off with the keynote lecture from Hseuh-Chia Chang, from Notre Dame and editor of Biomicrofluidics. Dr. Chang, entitled "AC Polarization of Nanocolloids and Their Impedance Signatures in Strong Electrolytes." Dr. Chang described a method for open-flow nanocolloid assays that had several advantages to traditional methods: fast (less than 1 minute), label-free, sensitive (down to picoMolar concentrations) to hybridization, selective (down to 3 base pairs), and portable.
The real highlight for the journal came on Tuesday evening, when several good friends of the journal gathered to discuss their own research and whatever else popped up over a glass of wine.
BMF dinner attendees (left to right):
Zhengdong Cheng, Texas A&M University;
Sumit Gangwal, North Carolina State University;
Hseuh-Chia Chang, Notre Dame;
Ehud Yariv, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology;
Kevin Dorfman, University of Minnesota;
Peng He, Texas A&M University;
Ahmet Can Sabuncu, Old Dominion University;
Leslie Yeo, Monash University;
Guiren Wang, University of South Carolina;