Editorial: A new year and a new Associate Editor

Abstract

Biomicrofluidics continued to experience another year of growth in 2010, both in terms of the number of papers published and, more importantly, their quality. We are particularly encouraged by the strong jump in the journal’s impact factor from 2.318 in 2008 to 2.895 in 2009, and are working hard to maintain a steady upward trend. There is no doubt in our minds that this is largely due to the continued support we have received from the microfluidics and nanofluidics community and we would like to thank our readers, authors, and reviewers for your contribution in various forms to the journal. As we write, we have just returned from the Second Advances for Microfluidics and Nanofluidics and Asia-Pacific Lab-on-Chip Conference (AMN-APLOC) in Singapore, which was sponsored by Biomicrofluidics. We are pleased to have seen many of our readers and authors at the conference, which has certainly grown in stature from the first AMN meeting in Hong Kong in January 2009, and we hope to see many more of you at the next meeting, which will be held in Dalian, China in mid-2012. The AMN-APLOC conference in Singapore also saw the launch of the Small Matters video contest and we will be announcing the opening of the next round soon, the winners of which will be announced in Dalian in 2012. In a field where visualization of various phenomena at small length scales and short time scales is crucial, multimedia plays an important role in the ability for authors to communicate results effectively and in a manner that creates impact. Therefore, we would like to encourage our readers and authors to include multimedia as part of your submission and invite you to participate in the contest. All multimedia that constitute part of the submission to the journal are included in our video gallery, and this collection is already freely available online athttp://bmf.aip.org/features/video_gallery. It is our aim that such a resource be made freely available to the public, with the hope of promoting and advancing the field, as well as constituting a pedagogical tool for use by instructors in undergraduate and graduate classes. The Methods and Fabrication section continues to grow since its launch in June 2010 with 13 articles published following its inception. Again, we see this as a valuable resource to students and researchers, particularly in building upon existing protocols in furthering micro∕nanofluidic science and technology as well as advancing micro∕nanofabrication techniques themselves. Thus, we would like to urge more researchers to share your fabrication and laboratory protocols with the wider community in the interest of advancing science, reducing duplication of effort, and lowering research costs. In recognition of our continued readership and authorship growth in the Asia-Pacific region and our ongoing strive to further improve the journal, we have appointed Professor Jianhua Qin as a new Associate Editor to the journal. Professor Qin, who has previously served on our Editorial Board, is currently the Director of the Microfluidics Research Center at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (Chinese Academy of Sciences) and plays a prominent leading role in microfluidics in the region. Her research which interfaces technology, biology, and medicine is widely respected within the community and currently encompasses the development of miniaturized tools to aid the study of cancer biology, tissue vascularization, and stem cells in addition to the design of new diagnostic, therapeutic, and high throughput screening strategies at the cellular and organism level. Of particular significance is her effort to use microfluidics to understand cell interactions and the interplay between different cell types within the tumor milieu by recreating its microenvironment in vitro. In addition, Professor Qin’s work is also aimed at investigating the effect of mechanical forces and the role of various combinatorial factors in the regulation of stem cell differentiation and lineage commitment. Finally, we welcome the addition of the following to our Editorial Board: Professor Justin Cooper-White (University of Queensland, Australia), Professor Kwan Hyoung Kwan (Pohang University of Science and Technology, Korea), Professor Frieder Mugele (University of Twente, The Netherlands), Professor Alexander Revzin (University of California, San Diego, USA), Professor Patrick Tabeling (Ecole Superieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielles de Paris, France), and Professor Hongkai Wu (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong). We are honored to have such a distinguished group of researchers on the board and look forward to working with them as well as our readers, authors, and reviewers to takeBiomicrofluidics to new heights.