Fig. A - The recovery stroke of a weak "puller" in a stagnant background flow in two-dimensions.
I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley in the Environmental Fluid Mechanics (EFM) group. My current research is on droplet interactions and coalescence in marine environments with applications to the fate and transport of oil during an oil spill.
I began my engineering studies at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in the Environmental Engineering (ENVE) program and graduated with a Batchlor's degree in June 1998. My senior project was a semi-analytical investigation of the tranport of diluent plumes in groundwater which sparked my interest in the role of fluid dynamics on the spread of contaminants in the environment. I realized that a deep understanding of fluid mechanics was an important component of solving real world engineering problems. In particular, I became interested in learning more about the capabilities of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models to predict and evaluate fluid dynamics problems related to natural systems.
I completed my Master's degree and Doctorate in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department (MAE) at the University of California, Irvine in 2002 and 2010, respectively. I was a student of Prof. Roger H. Rangel in the Multiphase Heat Transfer and Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (Fluids). During my graduate studies, I developed computational fluid dynamics solvers to explore fluid and solid structure interaction problems with biomedical applications. I recently completed a two year postdoctoral research program at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in the Linné Flow Centre in Stockholm, Sweden. During my postdoctoral work, I developed a two dimensional numerical model of a swimming green algal cell and participated in a research collaboration with TU-Delft in the Netherlands where I used a high precision parallelized fluid dynamics code to study the motion and nutrient uptake of model swimming microorganisms in suspension.
I am interested in developing computational fluid dynamics models that solve small scale fluid dynamics and heat transfer problems in the natural sciences. The fluid dynamics problems that I am interested in exploring involve multiphase flows and fluid and solid interactions. I have a broad range in future research goals that are related to the following topics in the natural sciences: sedimenting particles or droplets in non-colloidal systems, rheology of colloidal particles, swimming microorganisms in suspension or fluid flow, the motion of non-spherical particles in fluid flow, stratified flows, the motion of flexible filaments or capsules in fluid flows, and the motion of particles or living organisms at fluid interfaces. While my previous research has focused on fluid and solid interactions in low Reynolds number laminar flows, I am interested in learning more about fluid and solid interactions in turbulent flows which are more characteristic of actual flow conditions.
Fig. A - The recovery stroke of a weak "puller" in a stagnant background flow in two-dimensions.
Fig. B - Numerical domain used for the simulation of model microorganisms using the Immersed Boundary Method (IBM) for solid particles in fluid flow.
Presentation of the “Mass flux and particle motion in an active suspension” presented at the 9th European Fluid Mechanics Conference at the University of Rome in Italy from Sept. 9-13, 2012. PDF