From the micron-scale labyrinth of soil pores to kilometer-scale ocean eddies, transport is shaped by disorder, fluctuations, and gradients. In our Lab, we use ideas from fluid dynamics, soft matter and nonequilibrium physics to understand how interactions and heterogeneity shape pathways, fluctuations, and effective transport laws for particles, microbes, and chemicals in complex environments.
Our current research focuses on three themes:
- Soft and active matter in complex flows: bacteria, biofilms, and colloids in porous and oceanic settings, where confinement, hydrodynamic interactions, and chemical landscapes reshape trajectories and dispersion.
- Transport in living and biological networks: how feedback between flow, structure, and growth drives self-organization in decentralized systems (e.g., vascular networks and microbial communities).
- Vortical transport at the ocean surface: how eddies organize, fragment, and redistribute floating matter such as sea-ice floes and particulates.
We combine microfluidic and table-top experiments, numerical simulations, and theoretical modeling to identify governing mechanisms, connect scales through coarse-grained descriptions, and build predictive models of transport in heterogeneous media.
We organize a weekly seminar series on soft, fluid, living matter at Yale (link).