What we do in the Lab

We have a lot of focus on imaging at different length scales - millimeter scale for motility tracking; microscopic regime for structure and property analysis. So, a typical day in the lab involves a lot of imaging either at the optical or fluorescence microscope or imaging using one of our semi-micro-imaging setups involving either a Precision Zoom Lens or a DSLR Macro Lens. Our Precision Zoom lens is also capable of fluorescence imaging with the help of a few band pass filters and a light source. The subjects in our experiments are microscopic compartments/droplets and we tend to program their behaviour by engineering stimuli-responsive functions and produce the stimuli locally within the microscopic compartments. So, then it becomes important to track chemical concentrations in time and across the sample space. This leads us to be interested in Spatiotemporal (space and time) analysis of chemical concentrations - which we do qualitatively using fluorescence microscope or quantitatively using a fiberoptic spectrometer.  Interfacial tension plays a very important role at microscopic length scales and we like to measure it in different ways based on the system under investigation - either by using a drop shape analyzer which can by using various models infer the surface/interfacial tension and surface free energy; or by using microparticles as rheological probes to undertand viscosity of our samples.