Oliveira Lab Presents Constraint-Aware Biofilm Design at IWBDA 2026

Nona Hashemi presented work integrating microfluidic physics with agent-based biofilm simulation at the International Workshop on Biodesign Automation.

Oliveira Lab Ph.D. candidate Nona Hashemi presented “Constraint-Aware Biofilm Design: Integrating Microfluidic Physics into Agent-Based Modeling for Synthetic Biology” at the International Workshop on Biodesign Automation 2026 (IWBDA 2026) in Boulder, Colorado. Her talk focused on a biofilm-on-chip modeling framework that connects COMSOL-based microfluidic simulations with agent-based biofilm modeling to better understand how physical transport conditions shape biofilm growth and accumulation.

The work addresses an important gap in biofilm modeling: biological simulations can capture cell behavior and spatial biofilm development, but they often do not fully account for the microfluidic environment that cells experience on-chip. By incorporating hydrodynamic constraints, nutrient transport, and boundary-layer effects into the modeling workflow, this project aims to make biofilm predictions more realistic and experimentally relevant. The presentation highlighted Oliveira Lab’s broader effort to integrate synthetic biology, microfluidics, and computational modeling for more predictive design of engineered microbial systems.

You can read this conference paper at https://www.iwbdaconf.org/uploads/IWBDA2026_Proceedings_full.pdf