Introduction and Brief Description of the Symposia Funds are requested through the R13 program to support a series of symposia at the 2006 annual meeting of the American Electrophoresis Society (AES). This proposal describes the symposia that will focus on theoretical and experimental advances in bio-MEMS and microfluidic technology in the areas of cellular, genomic, and proteomic analysis. Due to AES's size and resources, their annual meeting is held in conjunction with the annual meeting of the American Institute for Chemical Engineers (AIChE). The AES symposia attract researchers from diverse academic backgrounds, which compliment AIChE's predominantly chemical engineering population. However, AIChE's rising registration costs have discouraged the involvement of additional researchers from industry and academia in the fields of biology, chemistry, medicine, biomedical engineering, and computational science. An ongoing challenge for the society has been to encourage attendance from these other disciplines. Last year for the first time, AES was able to attract additional educationally and demographically diverse young researchers with the support of 20 travel grants. However, the American Electrophoresis Society is not yet able to self sustain registration or travel grant support. The funds requested for 2006 will enable AES to continue to grow by offering approximately 20 registration / travel grants to graduate students and postdoctoral researchers at the crossroads of electrophoretic bioMEMS and genomics / proteomics. These travel grants will be instrumental in facilitating a growing multi- disciplinary forum for young researchers to benefit from the cross-fertilization of technical content and professional interactions at the symposia. The networking and professional interactions these young researchers would experience would be instrumental in catalyzing interdisciplinary collaborations that will enable them to develop the next-generation of genomic and proteomic analysis technology. The availability of student travel grants will also encourage participation by young investigator PIs whose graduate student travel funds may be limited. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]