Contemporary NMR and MRI instruments are big, immobile and expensive. I shall describe recent advances in our laboratory aimed at translating some of the capabilities of NMR and MRI on to a mobile microfluidic chip platform. Components of the converging methodologies include optical pumping and detection, functionalized biosensors, superconducting quantum interference detection, laser atomic magnetometry and remote microfluidic sensing at low magnetic field. Such developments will contribute to the possibility of targeted molecular and lab-ona- chip NMR and MRI in physics, chemistry and biomedicine.