Lab News

News from the Pahlavan Lab: papers, people, events, and stories about our work.

2026

October 2026: Upcoming: Amir will give invited talks at Syracuse University’s Physics Colloquium and in the Soft Hydraulics session at the Society of Engineering Science Annual Meeting.
September 2026: Amir gave an invited talk, “When Flow Networks Remember: Fluidic Hysterons and Collective Switching”, in the University of Pennsylvania’s Condensed and Living Matter seminar. Upcoming later this month: an invited talk in Penn’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics.
August 2026: Abhineet Rajput and Amir Pahlavan’s Fluidic hysterons and memory in flow networks is accepted by Physical Review X. The study shows how flexible fibers and fluid flow form controllable physical memory elements.
August 2026: Yale Engineering
Using salt to fight difficult-to-treat biofilms
Salt gradients help particles enter biofilms in laboratory pores, with the benefit depending on biofilm accumulation and particle size. Read the paper.
August 2026: Amir gave invited seminars in Mechanical Engineering and Chemical Engineering at Monash University, and in Chemical Engineering at RMIT University.
July 2026: Our preprint on particle migration in Taylor-dispersed channel flows shows how weak sideways salt gradients can redirect colloids between fast and slow streamlines.
July 2026: Amir’s review of diffusiophoretic transport in complex environments is available as a book chapter preprint.
June 2026: Zehao Chen and Amir Pahlavan’s Biofilm density regulates diffusiophoretic colloid penetration appears in Soft Matter. The work identifies how a living barrier limits gradient-driven particle delivery.
June 2026: Yale Engineering
From tiny particles to dancing droplets: Yale engineers explore the hidden physics of fluids
This feature visits the Pahlavan and Primkulov labs, exploring chemical guidance of particles, laboratory models of complex flows, and droplet dynamics.
June 2026: Amir gave an invited talk at the Gordon Research Conference on Granular Matter.
May 2026: Amir gave an invited talk on “Diffusiophoretic transport of a colloidal blob in porous media” in the Pore-Scale Physics and Modeling session at InterPore 2026.
March 2026: Amir gave an invited talk on “From Colloidal Diffusiophoresis to Bacterial Chemotaxis in Complex Environments” in the Interfacial Transport and Pattern Formation session at the APS Global Physics Summit (March meeting).
February 2026: Yale Engineering
Particles don’t always go with the flow (and why that matters)
Small chemical nudges move particles between fast and slow routes, changing transport through transparent laboratory models of porous materials. Read the paper.
February 2026: Mobin Alipour, Yiran Li, Haoyu Liu, and Amir Pahlavan’s study of colloidal transport in porous media is published in Science Advances and featured on the February 2026 cover.
January 2026: Amir gave an invited talk on “Chemical Gradients as Hidden Drivers in Soft Earth Materials” at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics conference, Hard Problems in Soft Earth Geophysics.

2025

December 2025: Yale Engineering
Yale Engineering’s top 10 stories of 2025
Yale Engineering includes the lab’s salt-driven particle-steering research among its ten highlighted stories of the year. Read the paper.
December 2025: Amir gave an invited talk on “Bacterial chemotaxis in porous media” in the American Geophysical Union session on Mixing, Reaction, and Microbial Processes.
October 2025: Amir gave an invited seminar on “Salt, Fibers, and Flow: Hidden Controls on Transport” at the Levich Institute, City College of New York.
July 2025: Yale Engineering
Amir Pahlavan wins NSF CAREER Award
A five-year NSF CAREER project supports experiments, simulations, and theory on how chemical gradients guide colloids through porous environments.
June 2025: We received an NSF CAREER award for our work on “Solute-mediated transport of colloids in porous media”.
March 2025: Yale Engineering
A pinch of salt stirs up a surprising physical phenomenon
Haoyu Liu and Amir Pahlavan show how salt gradients and channel-wall flows can reverse the direction in which microscopic particles concentrate. Read the paper.
March 2025: Haoyu’s work on the interplay between diffusioosmosis and diffusiophoresis and the focusing of colloidal vortices is published in Physical Review Letters.
March 2025: Our group attends the 2025 APS March meeting (Global Physics Summit 2025) in Anaheim, CA. We organized a Minisymposium on “Active Taxis in Dynamic Environments”, a Focus session on “Soft and Living Matter in Complex Environments”, and contributed 4 talks on “Biofilm Growth in Confinement”, “Soft Elastic Fibers in Confined Flows”, “Bacterial Chemotaxis in Complex Environments”, and “Carbonate Crystallization in confinement”.

2024

December 2024: Amir gives an invited talk at MIT Physical Math Seminar Series.
November 2024: We had a great time at the 2024 APS DFD meeting in Salt Lake city, Utah, with 10 contributed talks on a range of topics, from bacteria and biofilms to colloids and sea ice floes. Check out our entry in the Gallery of Fluid Motion (Watch the video).

November 2024: Amir gives an invited talk at University of Minnesota, SAFL seminar series.
July 2024: Amir gives a talk in Banff (BIRS) Workshop on Non-Newtonian Flows in Porous Media.
April 2024: Amir gives an invited talk at Yale University Chemical & Environmental Engineering Department.
March 2024: Amir gives an invited talk at Tufts University Mechanical Engineering Colloquium (link).
March 2024: Amir gives an invited talk in the 2024 APS March meeting on “Biofilm formation in confined environments” in the Focus session on “Phase Separation in Active Matter” (link).
March 2024: Our group attends the 2024 APS March meeting in Minneapolis with 5 contributed talks and an invited talk (1- Chemotactic response of bacteria to nutrient plumes in heterogenous flow fields, 2- Phoretic Delivery of Colloids to Biofilms in Complex Environments, 3- Self-assembly and control of water drops at an oil-air interface, 4- Steering Colloids across Solute-releasing Hydrogel arrays, 5- Phoretic Migration of Colloids in Cellular Flows, 6-Biofilm formation in confined environments).
March 2024: Amir is organizing a Focus session on “Soft and Living Matter in Geophysical Flows” in the 2024 APS March meeting (link).
February 2024: Amir gives an invited talk in the MIT Soft Materials Structures and Devices (SMSD) seminar series.

2023

December 2023: Amir gives a talk at the 2023 American Geophysical Union annual meeting (link).
November 2023: Amir gives an invited talk in the Civil & Environmental Engineering Seminar series at University of Southern California (link).
November 2023: Our group attends the 76th Annual Meeting of the Division of Fluid Dynamics held in Washington DC, with 9 contributed talks (1- Solutal instabilities for patterning during evaporation, 2- Phoretic Transport of Colloids through Solute-loaded Hydrogel Lattices, 3- Disorder-mediated diffusiophoretic transport of colloids, 4- Phoretic transport of emulsions through disordered media, 5- Self-assembly and control of water drops at an interface, 6- Chemotactic response of bacteria to ephemeral nutrient gradients, 7- Wetting transition and fluid trapping in a microfluidic fracture, 8- Reaction-mediated phoretic transport of colloids in microfluidic channels, 9- Two-phase displacement in capillary tubes: wetting transition and interface evolution.)
November 2023: Amir gives an invited talk in the Physics Colloquium at Wesleyan University (link).
October 2023: Amir gives an invited talk in the Fluids Seminar series at Brown University (link).
September 2023: Amir gives an invited talk in the Porous Media Tea Time talk series on “Steering colloids across complex flow landscapes” (link).
August 2023: Princeton Engineering
Harvesting water from fog, drop by drop
A collaboration including Amir Pahlavan explains how airflow aligns droplets on neighboring fibers and helps them merge and drain, suggesting ways to improve fog collection. Read the paper.
June 2023: Amir gives a talk in the 19th Northeastern Granular Materials Workshop at University of Massachusetts Amherst on steering colloids and crack patterns in drying suspensions (link).
June 2023: Amir gives a talk in the 97th ACS Colloid and Surface Science Symposium, held at NC State University, on solute-mediated transport across complex landscapes (link).
April 2023: Amir gives an invited talk in the Physics Colloquium at Clark University on “Steering colloids using solute gradients and flow across complex landscapes” (link).
March 2023: Our group attends the 2023 APS March meeting in Las Vegas with three contributed talks by Haoyu on “Steering colloids using solute gradients and flow” (link), Mobin on “Diffusiophoretic transport and dispersion of colloids across complex landscapes” (link), and Xiaolei on “Crack patterns in drying binary-mixture suspensions” (link). We look forward to the conference and meeting everyone.

2022

November 2022: We are excited to head to the 2022 APS DFD meeting in Indianapolis with three contributed talks by Haoyu on “Diffusiophoretic focusing of colloids in a microfluidic T-junction” (link), Mobin on “Diffusiophoretic transport of colloids in periodic porous media” (link), and Xiaolei on “Crack patterns in drying suspensions of binary fluid mixture” (link). Amir is also going to chair the Focus session on “Transport phenomena in active biological networks” (link).

October 2022: Amir gives an invited talk in the 23rd Annual Greater Boston Area Statistical Mechanics Meeting held in UMass-Amherst on “Diffusiophoretic transport of colloids in disordered media” (link).
September 2022: Hobart Chen and Aditya Pujari joined the group as PhD students. Welcome Hobart and Aditya!
July 2022: Amir co-chairs the Gordon Research Seminar on Flow and Transport in Permeable Media in Les Diablerets, Switzerland.

Conference participants gathered beside a GRC cow sculpture at the 2022 Gordon Research Conference in Les Diablerets, Switzerland.

May 2022: Amir co-chairs the Gordon Research Seminar on “Active and Passive Transport Processes in Biological and Geophysical Flows” in Les Diablerets, Switzerland in July 2022 (link).
April 2022: Xiaolei Ma joins the group as a postdoctoral associate. Welcome Xiaolei!
March 2022: We are attending the APS March meeting in Chicago, Illinois. Check out our Focus Session on “Transport Phenomena in Heterogeneous and Dynamic Environments: From Colloids to Active Matter” (link).
February 2022: Mobin Alipour joins the group as a postdoctoral associate. Welcome Mobin!

2021

November 2021: We are attending the APS DFD meeting in Phoenix, Arizona; our first in-person conference in nearly two years (check out our three talks: talk1, talk2, talk3).
October 2021: The SoFLivMat coffee hour at Yale gets started (link)
September 2021: Yale News
Office Hours: Amir Pahlavan
An introduction to Amir’s interests in fluid mechanics, soft matter, and the everyday puzzles that inspire his research.
September 2021: Haoyu Liu joins the group as the first PhD student. Welcome Haoyu!
August 2021: Together with Christina Kurzthaler of Princeton University, Amir is co-organizing a Focus Session on “Transport phenomena in heterogeneous and dynamic environments” for the APS March meeting, 2022 (link).
July 2021: Physics Magazine (APS)
Binary Liquid Mixtures Form Flattened Droplets
Experiments and simulations explain why evaporating droplets made from two alcohols briefly flatten before becoming rounded again. Read the paper.
May 2021: Amir gave an invited talk at UCSD Fluid Mechanics Seminar Series, presenting our work on the life and death of bubbles and drops (link).
March 2021: Amir gave an invited talk at Continuum Mechanics and Industrial Mathematics group at the University of Strathclyde, presenting our work on the life and death of bubbles and drops (link).
February 2021: New Scientist
In fizzy drinks, why do only larger bubbles oscillate as they rise?
Amir answers a reader’s question about why larger bubbles can rise along zigzagging or spiraling paths.

2019

July 2019: Quanta Magazine
Bubble Experiment Finds Universal Laws
A feature on confined bubbles explores how a narrow tube can erase details of their initial conditions and reveal repeatable breakup behavior. Read the paper.
July 2019: PNAS highlighted our work on the bubble pinch-off (link).
June 2019: MIT News
Researchers solve mystery of how gas bubbles form in liquid
MIT and Princeton researchers explain how confinement makes bubble breakup repeatable despite differences in the conditions that start it. Read the paper.

2015

July 2015: Physics Magazine (APS)
Understanding a Spreading Puddle
A theory incorporating molecular interactions between liquid and solid explains how a spreading puddle reaches its final shape. Read the paper.
July 2015: MIT News
Why do puddles stop spreading?
MIT describes how forces acting near a puddle’s edge resolve a familiar puzzle in liquid spreading. Read the paper. Related coverage: MIT homepage spotlight.