I'm a Research Scientist in the Biophysical Modeling Group, part of the Center for Computational Biology at the Flatiron Institute . My research focuses on understanding fluid-structure interactions in complex and active fluids. Understanding the features of such systems requires utilizing a wide range of tools, most of which either do not yet exist or which don’t exist in the required form. Over the past several years, I’ve spent time developing new numerical methods that allow rapid simulations of a wide
Asters centrate and generate rotational motion when confined to cylinders. This rotation is steady in small cylinders, oscillatory in medium sized cylinders, and ceases in large cylinders. We explain the appearance of switching using a mix of numerical and analytical models, and predict that switching transitions to steady rotation when density is increased, a prediction verified both in silico and in vitro . Joint work with Sami Bashar, Gokberk Kabacaoglu, John Oakey, Taylor Sulerud, Mike Shelley, and Jay
Kinetic theories have been successful in modelling the behavior of active nematic and polar fluids, but are high-dimensional, requiring both space and orientational degrees of freedom to be discretized. Coarse-grained models that integrate out the orientational degrees of freedom are cheaper, but necessitate closure assumptions. We have derived a closure model for polar fluids that is analogous to the Bingham closure for nematic fluids, preserving its best analytical qualities, and derived numerical methods