Manu Sridharan and Philip Brisk from CSE and Prof. William H. Grover from Bioengineering have been awarded a grant from the NSF Formal Methods in the Field program, to study correct-by-construction synthesis of programmable microfluidic chips. The burgeoning field of microfluidics and laboratory-on-a-chip technologies enables miniaturization and automation of chemical and life-science experiments, potentially yielding dramatic efficiency improvements for critical fields like drug discovery and biotechnology. However, designing a microfluidic chip and implementing the associated software currently requires a great deal of manual, error-prone work, negating some of the productivity gains from the technology. The research project will investigate automatic synthesis of complete and correct microfluidic chip systems, including customization of the chip design and controller software to meet the constraints of a specific researcher's laboratory.