Engineers and scientists are working more and more with soft materials, including biological and complex fluids. Soft materials from colloids, DNA and synthetic polymers, liquid crystals, micelles, foams, gels, emulsions to cellular membranes and living tissues are a broad class of materials that are ubiquitous in our daily life. They are also “soft” in the sense that they flow or distort easily in response to shear or other external forces; their macroscopic flow behavior is a strong function of the fluid microstructure. Understanding the physical forces controlling the structural scale of complex fluids in order to engineer materials with unique macroscopic properties is an exciting research field for chemical engineers. Recently, we have investigated the flow and deformation of soft (bio-)materials at the molecular scale and successfully established a link between the microscopic and macroscopic properties of soft materials. I will provide a number of highlights from our recent research related to single-DNA and cell dynamics in the presence of external forces. Finally, this talk aims at highlighting the most recent and promising research trends, the open challenges, and the possible routes to follow in the field of living soft materials.