Advances in Droplet Microfluidics for On-chip Reactions and Study of Cell Biology

This thesis is focused on droplet microfluidics and droplet manipulation techniques to enhance high throughput screening and on-chip reactions. The most impactful contributions of this thesis are inventing a selective droplet splitting technique using a single layer microfluidic valve (Chapter 3), demonstrating an integrated droplet generation, splitting, and merging technique for producing products of different concentrations (Chapter 4), and resolving the interaction mechanisms of sperm with soft curved interfaces using droplet microfluidics (Chapter 5).