Dolomite Microfluidics highlights of MicroTAS 2018
Dolomite Microfluidics attended our biggest event of the year in November – MicroTAS! Here’s the lowdown on our time spent in Kaohsiung, Taiwan…
Our booth was set up and ready for action when the doors opened on Sunday 11th and more than 900 worldwide scientists and professionals flooded in! This year’s venue was an exciting hub for nano, bio and medical research, and we loved chatting to the fellow microfluidics enthusiasts who visited our booth.
One of the highlights of MicroTAS this year was a relatively new competition we sponsored called Shark Tank. This was a fun, Dragon’s Den-style format, that gives people a platform on which to present their game-changing ideas for breakthrough technologies in the biochip market. The “Sharks” that made up the judging panel included our very own CEO, Mark (The Shark) Gilligan! We thoroughly enjoyed this competition, it was great to see young researchers considering their futures in business.
Professor Sunghoon Kwon (Seoul National University) won the 13th “Pioneers of Miniaturization” Lectureship competition, which we sponsored along with Lab on a Chip. Professor Kwon received a certificate, a monetary award and delivered a really interesting short lecture titled “Miniaturization for Personalised Medicine” at the conference. See a picture of him accepting his award from Mark on the right!
During the conference, Mark was also busy attending the Lab on a Chip editorial board meeting, a valuable group discussion that sets the direction for the journal that has played a pivotal role in helping the field develop. See the panoramic selfie below, which was taken by putting Mark’s phone on the lazy susan in the middle of the table!
It wasn’t all work though – we had so much fun at the 85 Sky Tower Hotel in the evenings, with all the leading researchers from round the world dancing the night away together!
Events like MicroTAS are interesting because you get to hear about the hot topics in microfluidics. The biggest upcoming field that we spotted was Organ on a Chip. This is clearly a fast-growing field, together with controlled release particle formation using microfluidics, and we see big potential for it in future.
One potential improvement for MicroTAS for us is that it would have been great to have a more business-focussed stream. The whole field is highly translational, and so a business perspective would be valuable for the companies present, as well as the young researchers.
That said, we had a fab time as always at this buzzing conference. The engaging programme of plenary talks, oral presentation contributions, scientific posters and competitions inspired everyone’s shared passion for microfluidics and provoked lots of interesting conversations. We’re already looking forward to the next MicroTAS in Basel, Switzerland, 2019! 😊
Lab on a Chip editorial board meeting