Deans’ Forum is a forum to discuss engineering education amongst the world leading engineering universities. The members include the University of Tokyo, ETH Zurich, Imperial College London, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, MIT, and UC Berkeley. This is the first year that the University of Cambridge joined this forum and also the first time that the University of Tokyo held a five-day intensive lecture programme and invited students and leading scientists from the member universities to have academic communications.

Qingxin Zhang from the Fluids in Advanced Manufacturing (FIAM) group here in IfM attended the event, which ran from 7th – 11th September and the topic of the programme was microfluidics and its biomedical applications. The lectures covered basic background knowledge, such as fluid equations, reaction and transport phenomena, and multiple phase flow in microchannels, as well as advanced research topics, for example electroactive microchamber arrays for single cell analysis, acoustofluidics and biomedical applications, and the influence of lasers on paramecium cells.