Texas A&M ENG-LIFE Workshop + Journal Club

The Llama and I attended the first Texas A&M University ENG-LIFE Workshop: At the Interface of Engineering and Life Sciences. I think it was a successful and productive workshop, with strong attendance from multiple disciplines and a fair amount of research that I consider to be interdisciplinary.

The talks were all short, 15 minute talks on a wide range of topics, ranging from bioenergy to microfluidics to biological pathways modeled as logic circuits. I think this format was successful because it allowed researchers from different departments on campus to get a brief overview of the work going on elsewhere at the university to identify new potential collaborators.

The Llama and I were fortunate to have a brief discussion with Professor Aniruddha Datta about his work on modeling biological systems using pathway logic after his talk. I suspect the relaxed format of the conference along with the relatively small size encouraged many such introductions and discussions.

One of the presentations was from Professor Arum Han, a collaborator of one of the professors who heads our journal club, Professor Tim Devarrene, and Professor Han spoke on his work with microfluidic devices tailored for biological research. His talk was relevant to this week's journal club paper.

This week's journal club paper: In vivo lipidomics using single-cell Raman spectroscopy by Wu et al. (2011). The presenters were two members of the Devarrene lab, and so my comment was directed to them.

My comment:
"At the ENG-LIFE Workship today, one of your collaborators, Professor Arum Han, spoke on microfluidic platforms for oil production analysis. Are you all considering combining Raman spectroscopy or something similar with a microfluidics platform for high-throughput screening?"


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