From left, Abe Lee, CADMIM center director and UCI's William J. Link Professor and chair of biomedical engineering; Gisela Lin, UCI CADMIM deputy director; and Ian Papautsky, CADMIM co-director, University of Illinois at Chicago, at the CADMIM Industrial Advisory Board meeting in Chicago in September. Elizabeth Monge / UIC Creative & Digital Services

UCI’s Center for Advanced Design and Manufacturing of Integrated Microfluidics has received a $750,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for ongoing research into developing miniature devices that can perform biochemical analytical functions quickly and inexpensively. These chips have the potential to rapidly detect dangerous toxins in the blood, quickly screen hundreds of potential drugs, isolate cells for cancer diagnostics and treatment or provide information on plant health that can improve crop outputs. “It is gratifying to know that the National Science Foundation is recognizing and rewarding the many accomplishments of CADMIM in its first five years in research, technology transfer and most importantly, in building a community of students, faculty and industrial members that bridges advanced research with real-world applications,” said Abe Lee, CADMIM director and William J. Link Professor and chair of biomedical engineering at the UCI Samueli School of Engineering. CADMIM, an NSF Industry-University Cooperative Research Center which launched five years ago, has two sites – one at UCI and another at the University of Illinois at Chicago. CADMIM researchers have collaborated with several industry leaders over the last five years including Beckman Coulter, Corteva Agriscience, KWS, Monsanto, QIAGEN, ThermoFisher Scientific, Canon U.S. Life Sciences, Procter & Gamble, GSK, Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation, Douglas Scientific, Amgen Inc., Genentech Inc., Corning Inc., Los Alamos National Laboratories and Air Force Research Labs.