tissue engineering research 
Tissue Engineering (Qing Song)
Parsons G116
Micro-Interfacial Science and Engineering
Surfactants find many applications in interfacial industrial technologies because of their surface tension lowering ability. In practical applications, both the equilibrium and the dynamical surface tension behavior of surfactant solutions can be important, and in high speed interfacial processes, the dynamic surface tension behavior is the more important one. Up to date, the research of kinetic adsorption from surfactant solution to air/water or oil/water interface, mainly focus on surfactant concentration below the critical micelle concentration (CMC). When surfactant adsorbs from solution with a concentration greater than the CMC, several additional processes occur that are not present at low concentrations. The diffusive transport of micelles and monomers and kinetic adsorption as well as the kinetics of micellar break-up then determine the rate of dynamic tension reduction. But the underlying mechanisms of kinetic adsorption from surfactant micellar solution are not well understood. We are interested to investigate the kinetic adsorption to air/water and oil/water interface from micellar surfactant solution and how the surfactant aggregates, such as micelle, influence and control the kinetic adsorption and flows, especially in micro scales.
Immuno-Engineering of Human Diseases
Microtools based on microfabrication and soft lithography are emerging as a new generation of tools for biology and medicine. Microtools are enabling new types of assays and screens that are impossible by traditional methods, and also allow improved quantitative, high-throughput, and single-cell analysis. My future research aims to understand the cellular immunobiology and immunoregulatory mechanisms during biogenesis of human disease, such as, age-related macular degeneration.
Cell and Tissue Engineering on Microscales
Cell function is modulated on a micrometer scale by a myriad of biochemical and biophysical interactions between the cell and the environment, the underlying substrate, and neighboring cells. Microfabrication technologies can be used to engineer the substrate’s microtopology and biochemical composition, as well as the type of cell surrounding each cell, with precise dimensional control and the repeatability over large areas. We are also interested in investigating cell and tissue engineering on microscales. HIGH-THROUPUT PHARMACEUTICAL ASSAYS Microfluids for integrated biochemical processing and analysis is still a relatively new field. Present state-of-the art technology utilizes slow, expensive robotized multi-pipetters which obtain an optical read-out from solutions delivered and retrieved before/after the biochemical reaction of interest takes place. This often results in the loss of both the initial kinetics and the spatial resolution of the biochemical process, and the cost of scaling up the number of simultaneous measurements increases with the number of measurements. Microfluidic devices can be designed to incorporate fluid delivery and sampling for/from single cells in massively parallel, on-line measurements. We are interested to develop analytical systems based on single cells for the detection of toxic agents. We are also interested in developing high-throughput pharmaceutical assays which can test the impact of the physico-chemical properties of pharmaceutical formulation, performance of the final pharmaceutical/biopharmaceutical dosage form.