Microscale Bioengineering Inspired by Nature: From Widgets to Cell Biology

Nature has accomplished impressive functionality through evolution that far surpasses our ability to recreate similar functionality through engineered systems. While nature is limited to leveraging and adapting the physics of the natural world, engineers are free to imagine. With notable exceptions such as digital computing, the freedom to imagine has often led to "over engineered" solutions rather than the simple solutions nature often achieves. At the micro scale the dominate physical phenomena is often different than at the macro scale. For example, diffusive transport becomes increasingly important and surface tension can dominate over gravitational forces. The scaling of these natural phenomena lead to a very different physical world than the one we live in and presents opportunities for elegant harnessing of these forces in useful and interesting ways. Microscale forces can be leveraged to realize a variety of functions ranging from sensing and control to manipulation and processing to creating systems aimed at recapitulating in vivo cellular structure and function. The presentation will include a microscale tutorial, examples of bioinspired micro/cellular scale engineering and a discussion of the promise and challenges in mimicking cellular microenvironments in vivo.