MilliDrop was created following the discovery of microfluidic technologies by its cofounders in the USA. In order to produce a fully-automated system for microorganism culture and analyzing, the MilliDrop team came back to millimetre, drop-based level. MilliDrop’s technology at the Laboratory of Colloids and Dispersed Materials of the Paris School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry (ESPCI). Today, MilliDrop machines are deployed in several research labs, such as the Max Planck Institute in Germany, the ESPCI and ENS in Paris and Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
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Denis Cottinet – co-founder
Denis Cottinet graduated from the ESPCI ParisTech School of Engineering. He then completed a PhD at Université Pierre et Marie Curie. In the Laboratory of Colloids and Divided Materials, he worked on demonstrating the potential for millifluidics in analyzing diversity within bacterial populations. He joined MilliDrop’s senior management in December 2015.
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Laurent Boitard – Co-Founder
Laurent Boitard graduated from the ESCPI ParisTech School of Engineering. After a PhD at Université Denis Diderot, he became interested in millifluidic technologies while research assistant at Raindance Technologies in the United States. There he demonstrated how these technologies could be applied in microbiology. He then created a model automating microorganism culture and analysis in the Laboratory of Colloids and Divided Materials at the ESPCI in Paris. Afterword, he developed the technology in the incubator at the Pierre-Gilles de Gennes Institute (IPGG). After securing the intellectual property, he focused on industrializing the production of these fully automated instrument.
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Jairo Garnica – co-founder
Jairo Garnica completed a PhD at the University of South Australia. Before joining MilliDrop, he was responsible for the development of microorganism screening platforms in the Laboratory of Colloids and Divided Materials for five years. He is the co-inventor of three of the patents licensed by MilliDrop.
