My group's interests lie at the nexus of physics, biology and biotechnology. Over the past half decade, we have focused on understanding the basic physics and biological applications of microfluidic technology. My group pioneered the development of Microfluidic Large Scale Integration (LSI), demonstrating the first integrated microfluidic devices with thousands of mechanical valves. This technology is helping to pave the way for large scale automation of biology at the nanoliter scale, and we have been exploring applications of “lab on a chip” technology in functional genomics, genetic analysis, and protein design. We are also active in the field of single molecule biophysics where we have focused on precision measurements on single molecules; topics range from time resolved force spectroscopy to topology of knotted polymers. In 2003 we demonstrated the first successful single molecule DNA sequencing experiments.