Structure and belonging: Pathways to success for underrepresented minority and women PhD students in STEM fields.

The advancement of underrepresented minority and women PhD students to elite postdoctoral and faculty positions in the STEM fields continues to lag that of majority males, despite decades of efforts to mitigate bias and increase opportunities for students from diverse backgrounds. In 2015, the National Science Foundation Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (NSF AGEP) California Alliance (Berkeley, Caltech, Stanford, UCLA) conducted a wide-ranging survey of graduate students across the mathematical, physical, engineering, and computer sciences in order to identify levers to improve the success of PhD students, and, in time, improve diversity in STEM leadership positions, especially the professoriate. The survey data were interpreted via path analysis, a method that identifies significant relationships, both direct and indirect, among various factors and outcomes of interest.

Digital microfluidics for spheroid-based invasion assays.

Cell invasion is a key process in tissue growth, wound healing, and tumor progression. Most invasion assays examine cells cultured in adherent monolayers, which fail to recapitulate the three-dimensional nuances of the tissue microenvironment. Multicellular cell spheroids have a three-dimensional (3D) morphology and mimic the intercellular interactions found in tissues in vivo, thus providing a more physiologically relevant model for studying the tissue microenvironment and processes such as cell invasion.

Digital microfluidics for automated hanging drop cell spheroid culture.

Cell spheroids are multicellular aggregates, grown in vitro, that mimic the three-dimensional morphology of physiological tissues. Although there are numerous benefits to using spheroids in cell-based assays, the adoption of spheroids in routine biomedical research has been limited, in part, by the tedious workflow associated with spheroid formation and analysis. Here we describe a digital microfluidic platform that has been developed to automate liquid-handling protocols for the formation, maintenance, and analysis of multicellular spheroids in hanging drop culture.

Fluorinated liquid-enabled protein handling and surfactant-aided crystallization for fully in situ digital microfluidic MALDI-MS analysis.

A droplet (digital) microfluidic device has been developed that enables complete protein sample preparation for MALDI-MS analysis. Protein solution dispensing, disulfide bond reduction and alkylation, tryptic digestion, sample crystallization, and mass spectrometric analysis are all performed on a single device without the need for any ex situ sample purification. Fluorinated solvents are used as an alternative to surfactants to facilitate droplet movement and limit protein adsorption onto the device surface.

Thiol-ene click reaction as a general route to functional trialkoxysilanes for surface coating applications.

Functionalized trialkoxysilanes are widely used to modify the surface properties of materials and devices. It will be shown that the photoinitiated radical-based thiol-ene "click" reaction provides a simple and efficient route to diverse trialkoxysilanes. A total of 15 trialkoxysilanes were synthesized by reacting either alkenes with 3-mercaptopropyltrialkoxysilane or thiols with allyltrialkoxysilanes in the presence of a photoinitiator.