The book is meant to be used as a text for an interdisciplinary course in micro- and nanofluidics that includes the study of ionic and biomolecular transport at the advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate levels. The rationale for this book is that most, if not all, problems in the twenty-first century are interdisciplinary in nature, yet no textbooks address the topics required for investigating problems that cut across disciplines in engineering, the physical sciences, and mathematics. The closest approach to this concept is in the several texts that address the thermal sciences at a strictly undergraduate level (Moran et al., 2003). Another set of texts addresses problems in applied mathematics applicable to engineering problems generally at the advanced graduate level (Bird et al., 2002). Still another set of texts under the general area of biophysics links the mathematics and biological sciences, again most often at the advanced graduate level (Murray, 2001, 2003). In contrast, this book aims at the advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate student pool.

A number of other related books are on the market, but all are monographs directed at the senior graduate student (Karniadakis et al., 2005; Masliyah and Bhattacharjee, 2006; Tabeling, 2005; Liou & Fang, 2006; Nguyen & Wereley, 2002; Bruus, 2008; Kirby, 2010; Chang and Yeo, 2010). All these texts emphasize the unique features of transport at the micro- and nanoscale, of which there are many.