Organism-Fluid Interactions

My research interests are focused on computational fluid dynamics to understand biological problems, fluid-structure interactions, methods to quantify fluid mixing, and modeling chemical-fluid interactions with moving boundaries. Generally, I am interested in the morphology and behavior of organisms in a fluid. The specific applications I have studied are 1) soft coral pulsing, 2) jellyfish swimming, and 3) airflow around cacti. 

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I model the elastic-structure fluid interactions using the immersed boundary method, developed by Charles Peskin. I have used an original implementation of the immersed boundary method and used and contributed to open-source software such as IB2d and IBAMR. I also have worked using industry-standard software to model rigid bodies in flow and explored experimental flow visualization.

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Video from M. Kremien, et al, “Benefit of pulsation in soft corals,” PNAS, 110 (22), 2013.