Scientific representation

Professor Kitamori is one of the founders of microfluidics. Especially, he established pressure driven microfluidics in early 1990’s and opened chemical and biomedical microfluidics. His initiation has been main stream of microfluidics today. Professor Kitamori’s approach to microfluidics was unique compared to other pioneers’ method which was based on miniaturization of electrophoresis. First of all, he developed his original detection method Thermal Lens Microscopy (TLM) in 1993, which is a kind of laser spectroscopy enabling detection of non-fluorescent molecules at even femto-mole to zepto-mole levels in liquid micro space. His TLM covers wide range of chemical species with ultra-sensitivity and became a powerful detection tool for his microfluidics and nanofludics. 

During the development of TLM around 1990, Professor Kitamori fabricated a small channel on a glass slide of an optical microscope and used it as a micro container of liquid samples. This was his first microfluidic device and he got an idea of liquid mixing and reaction, extraction, immunoassay, etc., etc. by designing channels on glass substrates flexibly. 

This was his initiation of the microfluidics today. Around 2000, Professor Kitamori summarized his microfluidics as the micro unit operation MUO and continuous flow chemical processing CFCP which is a general design method of microfluidic devices. He also developed and systemized variety of fabrication, glass bonding, surface modification, and flow control methods. Based on these methodologies, he opened practical and commercialized applications of microfluidics with his spinoff company IMT. He is challenging to construct large scale parallelized microfluidic devices for chemical plants now. On the other hands, he pioneered the nanofluidics technology and science. One of the typical challenges of his nanofluidics is single cell proteomics and elucidating liquids and fluids at nano spaces. Professor Kitamori contributed to found academic societies and communities of this field domestically and internationally. He was Presidents and Vice-presidents of launching committees of CBMS which is the steering committee of the µ-TAS conference, Lab-on-Chip journal of RSC, ISMM symposium, and CHEMINAS which is Japanese society for microfluidics. He was awarded by many international honors and elected as a foreign member of Royal Swedish Academy of Science by these contributions.