Chemistry professor receives three-year Beckman grant

Rustem Ismagilov, Assistant Professor in Chemistry, has received a three-year, $240,000 grant from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation to study the use of microfluidics to control chemical systems in a time-dependent fashion.

Microfluidics is the flow of fluids through channels narrower than a human hair. The technique is vital to the development of laboratories on a chip–miniature systems for conducting biological and chemical analyses.

As a Beckman Young Investigator, Ismagilov also will participate in a symposium sponsored by the foundation at the Beckman Center of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering in Irvine, Calif.

The Beckman grant follows in the wake of a new flow system developed by Ismagilov’s research group that brings laboratories on a chip one step closer to reality. Ismagilov described the system in February this year in the international edition of the chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie.