During the 5th International Symposium on Microchemistry and Microsystems（ISMM 2013）sponsored by the iChEM, Prof. Steven Quake, a professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics at Stanford University, and Members of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine, was invited by the iChEM to present a talk titled “Precision Measurement in Biology” in the morning of May 18, 2013.

Prof. Quake has developed technology that will allow scientists to integrate several complex experiments on a single device and devised an entirely new approach to the vexing challenge of growing protein crystals. His interests unite physics, biology, and biotechnology. His group pioneered the development of microfluidic large-scale integration (LSI), demonstrating the first integrated microfluidic devices with thousands of mechanical valves. He and his students have been exploring applications of this "lab on a chip" technology in diverse areas such as functional genomics, genetic analysis, microbiology, and structural biology. His group was the first to use microfluidic technology in the determination of protein structure through x-ray crystallography. Prof. Quake is also active in the field of single-molecule biophysics. In 2003, his group demonstrated the first successful single-molecule DNA-sequencing experiments—another promising technology for large-scale biological automation.

Prof. Quake earned his B.S. in Physics and M.S. in Mathematics from Stanford and his D.Phil. in Physics from Oxford University in 1994 as a Marshall Scholar. He did his postdoctoral work at Stanford with Stephen Chu single molecules of DNA extension. After Stanford, he joined the department of Applied Physics and Physics at the California Institute of Technology at the age of 26. In 2004, he moved back to join the newly formed Department of Bioengineering at Stanford. He has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) since 2006. In addition to his work at Stanford, he is a cofounder of both Helicos Biosciences and Fluidigm Corporation. In 2002, he was named as one of the Technology Review's TR35 (MIT annual list of world's top 35 innovators under the age of 35). In 2004, he was the recipient of the NIH Director's Pioneer Award. He is the 2012 winner of the Lemelson–MIT Prize.