RSC Americas Blog

“It was a great pleasure attending the workshop in Rio at PUC. I was impressed by the enthusiasm and significant size of the microfluidics community in South America with representatives from Brazil, Argentina and Chile. I sensed a great passion for this research area and found many impressive oral and poster presentations, especially in the area of physical and analytical sciences and also in biosciences applied to lab-on-a-chip. I made very many new connections and am looking forward to collaborating with researchers in South America as appropriate calls from funders will come out in the next months, like the Newton Fund, GCRF etc.”

The RSC was proud to award a prize from our journals Analyst, Analytical Methods and Lab-on-a-Chip for the best oral presentation selected from the posters. An RSC Book voucher and certificate were awarded to Ricardo A. G. Oliveira (CNPEM – LNNANO, Brazil) for the work entitled Microfluidic Electrical Double Layer Capillary Capacitors (μEDLC): a Low-Cost, Mass-Production Manufacturing, and High Analytical Performance Sensor for Nanomaterial Quality Control and Cancer Label-Free Diagnosis.  Also, two honorable-mention poster prizes from Chemistry World went to Nicolle Miranda de Lima (PUC-Rio, Brazil) and Magalí Mercuri  (CNEA – Argentina) who received electronic subscriptions to the magazine.

Prize ceremony photo with Prof Dr Marcio S Carvalho, Ricardo A. G. Oliveira, Magalí Mercuri, Elizabeth Magalhaes and Nicolle Miranda de Lima

According to Prof Tabeling:

“The organizers were very successful in gathering most of the microfluidic forces of Brasil and Argentina. This meeting will certainly help the community to gain in strength and visibility, and, at some point, get more easily involved in a number of areas, in which there exists, at the moment, a surge of activity, such as nanoflows, organ on an chip, or single cell. The meeting was very interesting. It showed a variety of technologies (such as 3D printing), well handled by the community, a variety of subjects (such as oil applications) positioned at the cutting edge of research. One may wish that the conference will motivate the government and the Industry, along with the medical community to increase their interest and support to a field that has the potential to stimulate, beyond research, interesting entrepreneurial developments.”

PUC-Rio in Rio de Janeiro, has a strong Engineering program, in which the LPMM-Laboratory of Microhydrodynamics and Flow in Porous Media laboratory working on Microfluidics is located. Prof Dr Marcio S Carvalho leads a research program on the free surface flows of complex liquids in microscale that occur in different situations.