HARVARD PHYSICIST TO GIVE LECTURE TONIGHT

David Weitz, a professor of physics who heads up the Experimental Soft Condensed Matter Group at Harvard University, will deliver the lecture
"Dripping, Jetting, Drops and Wetting: the Magic of Microfluidics" Wednesday, March 21 in room 200 of the Oceanography and Physical Sciences Building. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Weitz's visit to ODU is part of the Distinguished Visitor Lecture Series of the College of Sciences and Department of Mathematics and Statistics.

The lecture series during the 2006-07 school year has focused on multi-scale modeling and simulations for soft matter and complex fluids. This area of research and development is gaining momentum at research institutions and in private sector laboratories throughout the world.

Weitz's evening lecture will describe the unusual instabilities affecting fluid flow at the nanoscale, and how the instabilities can be used to create very small droplets for the fabrication of new classes of materials. The lecture also will explore how precise control afforded by microfluidic devices provides the enabling technology to use droplets as nanoreactors for combinatorial screening of chemical reactions for drug discovery.

Within the field of microfluidics, researchers also hope to produce devices similar in design and size to a microchip that can perform analysis on minute samples of liquids and gases. Blood analysis and other medical tests may some day be done with tiny, portable clinical instruments that could be used in the home.

For more information about the lecture series, visit http://www.lions.odu.edu/~rzhou/seminar.