MixingLab News

22 November 2023
Yiming, Athan, Doug, Yasser, and Keelin spoke at APS DFD. And it was good to reconnect with MixingLab alum Jinge (third from left), who also spoke.

DFD 2023 attendees from MixingLab

31 July 2023
Today Ruy successfully defended his dissertation, Fluid transport in oscillatory flows. Congratulations to Dr. Ibanez! He'll soon start a new position at Exponent Engineering, where we're sure he'll do great things.

11 January 2023
Today Ibrahim successfully defended his dissertation, On stabilizing aluminium electrolysis cells with oscillating currents. Congratulations to Dr. Mohammad! We wish him the best of luck in his new postdoctoral research position studying plasma physics with Prof. Adam Sefkow here at U of R.

22 November 2022
Yiming, Nikola, Doug, Ibrahim, and Keelin spoke at APS DFD 2022. We also saw many great talks from other teams and enjoyed countless informal scientific conversations. If nothing else, the pandemic reminded us not to take for granted the human and interpersonal joys of doing science.

DFD 2022 attendees from MixingLab

29 August 2022
Nikola has been featured as an outstanding Hajim School student for his accomplishments in the classroom and in research. Nice work, Nikola!

1 August 2022
Today kicks off our new five-year, multi-million-dollar BRAIN Initiative program. The program will address whether and how cerebrospinal flow in the brain is controlled by neuronal activity. We engineers will do fluid dynamics theory and simulation in collaboration with experimentalists working in vivo: Patrick Drew of Penn State, Laura Lewis of Boston University, Hajime Hirase of the University of Copenhagen, and Maiken Nedergaard of U of R, who will also lead the program. Read more here. Jack Thomas, Mujdat Cetin, and Jiebo Luo, all of U of R, will collaborate in simulations and in developing novel data analysis methods. It's an honor to work with such great colleagues, and we're excited for the discoveries that will come.

15 July 2022
Kim, Adi, and Doug presented remotely as part of the 9th World Congress of Biomechanics. We talked about our brain-wide model of the glymphatic system and about flows in cervical lymph vessels, and we enjoyed great conversations with colleagues.

12 May 2022
Today Bitong successfully defended his PhD dissertation, Ultrasound measurement in metal melts: Microscale mechanisms and improvements. Congratulations Dr. Wang! His presentation and dissertation were so well-polished that his committee requested no revisions at all.

4 April 2022
Jarod has won a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, woohoo! The fellowship will provide financial support for his upcoming PhD studies and is a great honor; only about one in ten applicants receive fellowships. Big congratulations go to Jarod.

22 March 2022
Helena has been awarded the Charles L. Newton Prize by the Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Science. Recognizing "engineering students who show a special proficiency in an engineering subject and have conducted research, given a presentation, or published a paper", the Newton is the top prize for undergraduate research in the Hajim School. Helena is the lead author of A hydraulic resistance model for interstitial fluid flow in the brain and has given great public presentations about her work, including one at APS DFD 2021. Congrats Helena! And Hats off to the MixingLab undergraduates, who've brought home Newton prizes four out of the last five years.

7 March 2022
At TMS 2022, Bitong presented a talk and a poster, and Ibrahim presented two talks. At TMS, we saw some colleagues from U of R (pictured) and enjoyed great presentations and conversations with many others as well.

TMS 2022 attendees from the University of Rochester

3 December 2021
Today Bitong gave an invited talk for the UR Nano seminar, talking about his work characterizing microscale mechanisms of ultrasound scattering in liquid metal and about microscale analysis of the methods he devised for adding a protective coating to the copper plates in our rig modeling flow in liquid metal batteries. The talk was clear and interesting, stuffed with lovely results. Nice work, Bitong!

Bitong gives the URNano seminar.

23 November 2021
This week, Kim, Helena, Yiming, Jarod, and Ibrahim spoke at APS DFD, and Doug attended the conference, too. It was great to back in person, fun and productive, with lots to learn and share. Shout out to the APS for their always-excellent organizing.

Helena, Jarod, Kim, Doug, Yiming, and Ibrahim at APS DFD 2021.

8 October 2021
Heartfelt thanks go out to all who participated in and helped facilitate The Glymphatic System: From Theoretical Models to Clinical Applications in Copenhagen this week. It was a pleasure to co-organize (with Maiken Nedergaard), and the individual thanks I've received are rightly shared with everybody involved. I think many of us learned a great deal and will go back to the lab energized. I also think these and ongoing conversations, along with the consensus manuscript we're writing, will significantly advance the field. Thanks go also to the Lundbeck Foundation and the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters for material support.

30 September 2021
Big congratulations go to Adi, who today won the Steadman Family Postdoctoral Associate Prize in Interdisciplinary Research. Given once a year, the award goes to the postdoctoral researcher who gives the best three-minute talk about her/his research. Tip-of-the-hat to Adi for drawing analogy between a banana in the tailpipe and impeded lymph vessels failing to remove brain waste! The win continues a tradition — Jeff won second place in 2017.

25 May 2021
Doug gave a keynote talk today at the Micro and Nano Flows conference, hosted by Imperial College London. The title was "Microscale flows removing waste from the brain: Drivers, characteristics, and mysteries." It was an honor to participate -- big thanks to Sam Au and Demetrios Papageorgiou for the invitation. We can all look forward to holding future meetings in person instead of virtually.

13 April 2021
Daniel has accepted a prestigious NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunities fellowship. The fellowship will provide financial support for PhD study and also give him the opportunity to work at NASA for 10 weeks per year as a PhD student. He chose the NASA program over another offer, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Congratulations Daniel!

24 March 2021
Daniel has been awarded the Charles L. Newton Prize by the Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Science. Recognizing "engineering students who show a special proficiency in an engineering subject and have conducted research, given a presentation, or published a paper", the Newton is the top prize for undergraduate research in the Hajim School. Daniel is coauthor of our paper about efficient reactive mixing, is first author of our paper about clearing brain waste via dispersion, and presented at APS DFD in both 2019 and 2020. Congratulations Daniel!

11 January 2021
Doug gave a talk about our liquid metal batteries work at the WCCM-ECCOMAS Congress, held virtually this week. You can watch the talk right here. Thanks go to Jon Cheng for producing the results presented, and for Tom Weier, Oleg Zikanov, and Weitze Herremann for organizing the session.


24 November 2020
At this year's (virtual) APS DFD meeting, Doug gave an invited talk and Jeff, Adi, Jon, Fatima, Keelin, and Daniel presented, too. Too bad we couldn't meet in person. Next year…

20 November 2020
Today it was announced that Beauclaire, who did full-time research with the team through the summer of 2018, has been named a 20201 Global Rhodes Scholar. He's the first Rhodes Scholar from U of R in 56 years, and the third ever. The scholarship will allow him to undertake two years of graduate study at Oxford University starting fall 2021. Congratulations, Beauclaire!

18 April 2020
Big congratulations go today to Fatima, who won a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship. The competitive NDSEG fellowships support up to three years of graduate study and are intended to increase the number of US citizens trained in science and engineering disciplines of military importance. Fatima's work on the glymphatic system exemplifies that intention, being tied closely to our Army MURI grant. She'll continue doing great research. Nice work Fatima!

11 April 2020
Logan has been awarded the Charles L. Newton Prize by the Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Science. Recognizing "engineering students who show a special proficiency in an engineering subject and have conducted research, given a presentation, or published a paper", the Newton is the top prize for undergraduate research in the Hajim School. Logan presented at APS DFD and is co-author on our Science paper about stroke. Congratulations Logan!

28 February 2020
Bitong and Doug spoke this week at the TMS 2020 conference in San Diego. Jon and Ibrahim also attended, and we all learned a lot.

Bitong, Ibrahim, Jon, and Doug at TMS 2020.

30 January 2020
Our paper Cerebrospinal fluid influx drives acute ischemic tissue swelling has been published in Science and featured by URMC Newsroom, University of Copenhagen, and New Atlas. When a brain blood vessel gets blocked and a stroke results, the worst tissue damage occurs where swelling is most severe. Medical texts teach that the fluid causing swelling comes from blood, but we discovered that, at first, it comes instead from cerebrospinal fluid, along the glymphatic pathway. Our findings may improve future stroke treatments.

26 November 2019
Logan, Daniel, Ruy, Jon, Jeff, Jack, and Doug presented at the 72nd meeting of the Division of Fluid Dynamics of the American Physical Society. It was a great, fun, productive meeting.

9 August 2019
Doug won an inaugural David T. Kearns Faculty Teaching and Mentoring Award. Given by the Kearns Center, the award recognizes "outstanding faculty members who excel at mentoring and teaching low-income, first-generation, and/or underrepresented minority students who participate in Kearns programs". Doug is honored by the award and glad all over to contribute to the great mission of these strong programs.

30 May 2019
Jeff's work and his Career Award at the Scientific Interface are featured by the Hajim School.

18 May 2019
Congratulations to Dr. Rakan Ashour and Dr. Thomas Nevins, who were hooded at today's PhD graduation ceremony!

Rakan, Doug, and Thomas showing their academic regalia

16 May 2019
Today Jeff won a Career Award at the Scientific Interface from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, woohoo! The award comes with $500,000 of funding and is given to outstanding postdocs transitioning from the physical sciences to the biological sciences. Only 11 such awards were given this year, nationwide. After another year in Rochester, Jeff will take the remaining funds with him to the tenure-track faculty position he's accepted in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Minnesota. Great things are ahead for this guy!

18 April 2019
Today Doug gave the Applied Dynamics Seminar at his alma mater, the University of Maryland. The audience seemed to ask all the right questions and guess the dynamics of the glymphatic system ahead of time—it was a fun talk. Conversations with UMD scientists were also great. Thanks go to Dan Lathrop for the invitation (among many other things).

13 April 2019
Today we celebrate Thomas Nevins, who successfully defended his dissertation, Fronts and Filaments: Methods for Tracking and Predicting the Dynamical Effects of Advection on Excitable Reactions. In addition to demonstrating mastery of advection-reaction-diffusion dynamics in experiment and simulation, Thomas also demonstrated (with more than a little help from his wife, Mandy) mastery of scientific cake decoration. As you can see below, his cake is a high-fidelity model for a checkerboard array of quasi-two-dimensional vortices mixing the (red and blue) Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction! (You can also see that these vortices aren't time dependent, and haven't deviated from their regular array, so it must be a low-Reynolds-number cake.) Sincere congratulations to Dr. Nevins!

Vortex cake!

3 April 2019
A team including Doug won a five-year, $6.25M Army grant to study how the glymphatic system's work during sleep improves our cognitive abilities when we wake up, and what might be done to improve cognition of sleep-deprived soldiers. Woohoo! Maiken Nedergaard at University of Rochester is leading the project, and collaborators include Jack Thomas at U of R, plus Guilio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli at the University of Wisconsin. The MURI announcement has a link at the bottom to the list of awards.

12 March 2019
At TMS this week, Bitong presented both a talk and a poster about his work applying ultrasound mixing measurements to metals casting. Nice job!

5 March 2019
At the APS March Meeting this week, Jeff spoke about fluid flow in the glymphatic system, and Thomas spoke about the role of strain in reactive mixing. Keep spreading the science, guys!

13 February 2019
Rochester City Newspaper published an article about our work on brain fluid dynamics and its possible link to Alzheimer's disease.

25 January 2019
Our work on fluid flow in the brain, and particularly our paper Flow of cerebrospinal fluid is driven by arterial pulsations and is reduced in hypertension, were featured today by the University of Rochester Newscenter.

5 January 2019
This weekend at Dynamics Days in Evanston, IL, Jeff gave a talk about time-asymmetry of coherent structures in chaotic flows, and Thomas presented a poster about the effects of shear on apparent reaction front speed in reactive mixing. Nice! Doug went along just to cheer.

14 December 2018
Big congratulations go today to Rakan, who successfully defended his PhD dissertation, “Tackling Key Engineering Challenges in Liquid Metal Batteries: Temperature and Mass Transport ”. It's a nice piece of work and a substantial accomplishment. He's moving on to start work next month at Boston Metal, a startup working on electrochemical manufacture of metals beyond just aluminum. Steel production accounts for a significant part of global carbon dioxide emissions, so their technology could make a big impact on our climate, and therefore human quality of life. We wish Dr. Ashour all the best!

Congratulations to Dr. Ashour!

10 December 2018
Thomas spoke today at the Science, Technology, and Innovation Exchange, a conference run by the DoD Basic Research Office and featuring the work of NDSEG Fellows (including Thomas).

20 November 2018
Ben, Thomas, Bitong, Ruy, Ibrahim, Jeff, and Doug spoke at the 71st meeting of the Division of Fluid Dynamics of the American Physical Society, and Rebeca presented a poster. We also heard some great talks, swapped ideas for new experiments and analysis, and learned about ongoing science elsewhere. Good times!

The MixingLab crew at DFD 2018

19 November 2018
Our work on drug delivery has been featured by Forbes.

8 November 2018
Rebeca presented a poster about her work on fluid dynamics of brain waste removal at SHPE 2018.

22 October 2018
A team including both Rakan and Doug won $1M to install solar panels and grid-scale storage at U of R, as NYSERDA announced today. Funded by the Energy to Lead Competition, the project will produce enough renewable energy to make the Center for Energy and Environment building nearly net-zero. Maybe more importantly, our 400 kWh of grid-scale storage will be one of the larger installations in Upstate New York and will produce copious data logging its operation, useful for replicating the system elsewhere. Congrats go especially to Carmie Garzione, who led the team. Read more at the U of R Newscenter.

22 October 2018
Our work on drug delivery has been featured on Yahoo! News and the URMC Newsroom. We used our front tracking algorithm to measure the rate at which fluid flows into the brain via the glymphatic system, which Maiken Nedergaard and her team controlled by varying the saltiness and sugar-iness of cerebrospinal fluid, driving osmosis. Delivering drugs to the brain is notoriously difficult, and passing drugs in via glymphatic flows, which also sweep away waste, might really help.

11 October 2018
Big thanks go to Laser Lab Director Mike Campbell for presenting this semester's Alternative Energy and Fluid Mixing Seminar today, with the provocative title “On Earth God’s work must truly be our own: The pursuit of fusion”. I counted 77 in the audience, and the talk led to interesting conversations about sustainable energy.

9 October 2018
Doug presented a seminar in Biomedical Engineering at U of R today, with the title “Brain waste removal: fluid dynamics, arterial pulsations, and hypertension”. Thanks go to the audience for lots of great questions.

27 September 2018
Ibrahim won first place for his poster at the NY-BEST conference (that is, New York Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium) today—congrats! Frederico, Beauclaire, Rakan, Bitong, and Doug also attended.

30 July 2018
The summer research of Frederico and Beauclaire is highlighted by the U of R Newscenter. Nice work, guys!

3 May 2018
Jeff Tithof's video Rocky Turbulence won the top prize at the University of Rochester's Art of Science Competition. Congrats to Jeff!

Rocky Turbulence

9 April 2018
Our paper Front tracking velocimetry in advection-reaction-diffusion systems was accepted and will appear in Chaos. The paper extends our earlier work, describing a new tool for automated tracking of reaction fronts where flowing fluid as well as chemistry cause the front to move.

15 December 2017
Our paper Competing forces in liquid metal electrodes and batteries was accepted and will apear in Journal of Power Sources. The paper uses experiments and simulations to show how flow driven by heat and flow driven by electrical current compete in liquid metal batteries.

24 November 2017
Our review paper Fluid mechanics of liquid metal batteries was accepted and will appear in Applied Mechanics Reviews. The paper gives an overview of the mechanisms driving flow in liquid metal batteries and the engineering opportunities to improve battery design in light of those mechanisms.

21 November 2017
Ben, Jinge, Ruy, Ibrahim, Thomas, Humberto, Jeff, and Doug all spoke at the APS DFD conference. We also saw some great talks from other groups, had interesting conversations, and thought about collaborations. Ah, science is fun!
MixingLab members and friends at DFD 2017

17 November 2017
Our paper Optimal stretching in the wake of a bluff body was accepted and will appear in Chaos. We found that the same range of optimal stretching that promotes reaction in a closed flow (documented in our 2016 Phyiscal Review Letters paper) also occurs in an open flow.

24 October 2017
Logan Bashford has joined the MixingLab team to work on liquid metal batteries. Welcome!

28 October 2017
Doug spoke today at the NY Climate Solutions Summit, a workshop organized by a coalition of New York nonprofits and attended by about 200. You can see slides from his talk, Understanding how our electricity system works.

13 October 2017
This week Rakan's poster presentation won second place at the NY-BEST Technology Conference, and Jeff's talk won second place at U of R's Steadman Prize postdoctoral research competition. Nice work, gentlemen!

20 September 2017
Our new work on fluid mixing in the brain's waste disposal system will continue, thanks to the five-year, $3.2 million grant that we just won from the National Institutes of Health. Woohoo! The grant goes to a team led by Maiken Nedergaard and including Ali Ertüruk, John H. Thomas, Jessica Shang, and Doug Kelley. The grant is featured by the URMC Newsroom.

19 September 2017
Doug gave a talk entitled "Transitions between electromagnetic flow states in liquid metal batteries" at the High Temperature Batteries for Stationary Energy Storage Workshop in Trondheim, Norway. The conference drove some good discussion and included a very interesting tour of the Hydro Aluminum plant in Sunndalsøra. Thanks go to the organizers!

18 August 2017
Thomas presented his talk, "Dynamics of reaction front growth in unsteady flows", at the Canadian-American-Mexican Graduate Student Physics Conference in DC.

11 August 2017
Ibrahim's work with Team Meliora, competing for the Hult Prize by developing a business plan to provide modular homes for Syrian refugees, is featured at the U of R Newscenter.

4 August 2017
Meghan's work is described in more detail in a Photo Friday article.

31 July 2017
Meghan's work is featured at the U of R Newscenter, in an article highlighting undergraduate research at University of Rochester. We're big fans: undergraduate research does much to advance both the research and mentoring missions of the University. Meghan, Drew, Ben, Jinge, and Mira have done great work this summer.

25 July 2017
Welcome to Andreas Wiederhold, a PhD student visiting from TU Ilmenau for a month of summer research.

30 May 2017
Rakan gave a talk, Electrochemical characterization of low temperature molten salt electrolyte for sodium based liquid metal batteries, at the 231st meeting of the Electrochemical Society.

28 May 2017
Welcome to Meghan Patrick, Mira Bodek, and Andrew Fianu, who will join the team this summer.

23 May 2017
Doug gave a talk, Stretching and speed in excitable advection-reaction-diffusion systems, at the SIAM Conference on Dynamical Systems.

17 May 2017
Doug gave a talk, "Current path and electrode mixing: Experiments and models", at the International workshop on liquid metal battery fluid dynamics.

4 May 2017
Ibrahim's work making 3D-printed prosthetics is featured in a thorough article on vice.com.

28 April 2017
Jinge won a Discover grant, which he will use to complete his studies of reactive mixing in the wake of a bluff body. We hope to have the results submitted for publication this summer. Congratulations Jinge!

28 April 2017
Doug won the G. Graydon Curtis and Jane W. Curtis Award for Nontenured Faculty Teaching. Woohoo!

24 April 2017
Thomas won University of Rochester's 2017-2018 Bernard Fellowship, recognizing one PhD student in science or engineering for outstanding achievement in coursework and research. Congratulations Thomas, and keep up the good work!

11 April 2017
Thomas won an NDSEG Fellowship, woot! The prestigious award, one of just 150 given nationally this year, recognizes his “ability and special aptitude for advanced training in science and engineering”. The award also provides funding for his work for three years. Congratulations Thomas! The team is having a great week.

10 April 2017
Bitong has successfully defended his Masters degree and will now move on to PhD study. Congratulations to Bitong on a job well done!

7 April 2017
Today Ibrahim won the Helmut Weymann prize of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, recognizing “a graduating ME senior who shows the skill and ingenuity in the experimental aspects of engineering sciences exemplified by the award's namesake". Helmut Weymann was a faculty member in the department. Congratulations Ibrahim!

23 March 2017
Arunas Chesonis, CEO of Sweetwater Energy, spoke at Rochester Museum and Science Center tonight as part of the Alternative Energy & Fluid Mixing seminar series. His interactive and engaging talk spurred great discussion among the audience of about 40. We are grateful to RMSC for providing the space, Mr. Chesonis for speaking, and the NSF Fluid Dynamics program for funding the seminar series.

22 March 2017
Our paper Front tracking for quantifying advection-reaction-diffusion will appear in Chaos.

15 March 2017
Jeff and his colleagues from Georgia Tech published Forecasting Fluid Flows Using the Geometry of Turbulence in Phys. Rev. Lett.

8 March 2017
Ibrahim and his team were finalists at the Hult Prize competition in San Francisco last week. The prize, sponsored by the Hult International Business School, is the largest social entrepreneurship competition in the world. The team is working to build low-cost refugee housing from modular, recycled materials. Read more. Nice work guys!

2 February 2017
You can now read about the International Workshop on Liquid Metal Battery Fluid Dynamics (LMBFD 2017), which will take place 16-17 May in Dresden, Germany, and which Doug is co-organizing. Registration opens 15 February, and abstracts are due 5 March. Check it out!

19 January 2017
Our paper Molten amide-hydroxide-iodide electrolyte for a low-temperature sodium-based liquid metal battery has been published in J. Electrochem. Soc.

17 January 2017
Doug presented a poster today about reactive mixing at the Transport in Unsteady Flows workshop at Banff International Research Station. The poster, with Thomas as lead author, considered optimal stretching and front tracking. Tomorrow Doug will go skiing!

14 December 2016
Doug spoke tonight to Girl Scout Troop 60516 about energy, sustainability, and our work in grid-scale storage. Thanks to the Girl Scouts for thinking and learning about living sustainably!

26 November 2016
Our work to understand the role of phytoplankton in Earth's carbon cycle by modeling it with reactive mixing in the laboratory was featured in a particularly clear and elucidating article in the Rochester Review. Thanks go to Kathleen McGarvey for great coverage.

20 November 2016
Doug, Jeff, Thomas, Rakan, and Ibrahim spoke today at the APS DFD meeting in Portland, OR. Nice job, team, and thanks to those who attended. Got questions or comments or ideas for collaboration? Email us.

29 October 2016
Doug spoke today at "Watt's Up? A Discussion about Power", a forum on energy technology and energy policy in Corning, NY. The event was sponsored by People for a Healthy Environment and Mothers Out Front.

21 October 2016
After some difficulty with airline travel, Don Sadoway gave the first Alternative Energy & Fluid Mixing seminar today, entitled “Innovation in stationary electricity storage: The liquid metal battery”. About fifty attended and responded with many lively questions. Don also had a little time to tour our labs and talk research. Don: thanks for coming!

23 September 2016
Our paper Optimal stretching in advection-reaction-diffusion systems will appear in Phys. Rev. Lett. Our work shows that excitable chemical reactions can be either promoted or blown out by changing the rate at which the fluid in which they occur is stretched. When plankton grows in Earth's oceans, the growth rate probably depends on stretching.

17 September 2016
Our Upward Bound course was featured in a Democrat & Chronicle article about a new grant to expand the program. Congrats to Beth Olivares and Upward Bound!

10 September 2016
Bitong Wang joins the team this fall to work on our casting project, recently funded by NSF MEP. Welcome, Bitong!

26 August 2016
Doug gave a talk entitled "Low-dimensional convection models from vector cylindrical harmonics" at ICTAM, about work toward making battery models for use in industry.

5 August 2016
Doug's grant from NSF Materials Engineering & Processing, and our project to enable ultrasound velocimetry for metals casting, is featured in an article in Research Connections.

2 August 2016
Doug and Alice Quillen of Physics & Astronomy hosted a half-day workshop on Physical Models of Biological Systems, bringing together researchers from different U of R departments who have similar interests and potential to collaborate. Thanks to all who presented and attended!

20 July 2016
Doug won a grant from NSF's Materials Engineering and Processing program to enable ultrasound measurement in metals casting, in collaboration with Antoine Allanore, a materials scientist at MIT. We're excited to start the work!

12 July 2016
Doug spoke at the annual workshop of the LIMTECH collaboration, a joint effort of German universities and research institutes studying magnetohydrodynamics. Doug's presentation, "Magnetohydrodynamics of liquid metal batteries", was one of two invited talks. After the workshop, he heartily enjoyed two days touring labs and talking science at HZDR. Many thanks to the hosts!

5 July 2016
A big welcome goes to Jeff Tithof, who joins the group as a postdoctoral researcher. Jeff has just completed PhD work in physics in the group of Michael Schatz at Georgia Tech, using dynamical systems tools to study chaotic and turbulent fluid flow. In Rochester, Jeff will apply persistent homology to reactive mixing—and probably work on lots of other interesting things, too.

8 June 2016
The U of R Newscenter published an article about the University's 2016 CAREER winners, with a brief summary of our liquid metal batteries work.

6 June 2016
Doug gave an invited talk entitled "Optimal stretching for growth in reaction-diffusion-advection systems" as part of a minisymposium on active fluid flows at Dynamics Days Europe.

31 May 2016
Rony Colon, Alfonso Gonzalez, John Quinlivan and Jinge Wang have joined the team.

2 May 2016
We're grateful for a grant from the Valerie and Frank Furth Fund, which will support upgrading the ultrasound instrument we use for liquid metal experiments, enabling three-dimensional velocity measurements.

15 April 2016
A nice article in Research Connections explains the motivation for and goals of the team's work funded by Doug's NSF CAREER award.

11 March 2016
Jeff Tithof visited the lab and gave the Mechanical Engineering Seminar: “Forecasting turbulence using special solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations”.

26 February 2016
Doug's CAREER award was featured on the ME Department website.

19 February 2016
Doug's CAREER award was mentioned in U of R's Research Connections.

16 February 2016
Doug won an NSF CAREER Award to build multiphase models of fluid mixing in liquid metal batteries. Woohoo!

5 February 2016
Dan Steingart visited the lab and gave the CEE Rosenberger Seminar. His title: Learning new things from old chemistries: Revisiting ideas "before lithium ion".

22 November 2015
Doug, Rakan, and Varchas spoke today at the 2015 APS DFD in Boston, and Doug chaired session A5: Reacting Flows: General.

12 November 2015
Rakan presented a poster on mass transport in liquid metal batteries at the NY-BEST Energy Storage Technology Conference. Doug and Thomas also attended and enjoyed the presentations and conversation.

Rakan at NY-BEST Tech 2015

1 September 2015
Catherine Knox and Brian Knisely have joined the team. Welcome!

1 September 2015
Bill Nye mentioned liquid metal batteries in his talk at U of R. Apparently he's a fan.

5 August 2015
Our paper on running liquid metal experiments was published in J. Visualized Exp.

4 June 2015
Our work on liquid metal batteries is highlighted by U of R Mechanical Engineering.

20 May 2015
Doug gave an invited talk, "Flow and grow: Experimental studies of time-dependent reaction-diffusion-advection systems" in a minisymposium on reactive mixing at the SIAM Conference on Dynamical Systems. Thanks go to Kevin Mitchell, Tom Solomon, and John Mahoney for organizing!

20 April 2015
Our paper Ultrasound velocity measurement in a liquid metal electrode will appear in J. Visualized Exp.

8 April 2015
Linda won a fellowship from the Research Internships in Science and Engineering program and will spend the summer doing research in Germany.

3 March 2015
Thomas Nevins and Rakan Ashour have joined the MixingLab team.

13 February 2015
Doug spoke about particle tracking at the Rochester ASME Student Night.

4 February 2015
Doug gave the Reed College physics seminar, speaking about coherent structures in scalar and reactive mixing.

8 January 2015
Doug spoke at the U of R's Laboratory for Laser Energetics today about scalar and reactive mixing.

12 December 2014
Today Rachel successfully defended her Master's thesis, Calibration of a plenoptic camera for use in three-dimensional particle tracking. Congratulations Rachel!

25 November 2014
Today we presented two talks at the 67th meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics in San Francisco. Doug spoke about our work on liquid metal batteries: Low-dimensional model of mixing in a liquid metal battery. Jessie spoke about our work on oceanic phytoplankton growth: Simultaneous tracking of particles and reaction fronts in mixing.

14 November 2014
Today Doug talked about swarming at the University of Rochester Mechanical Engineering Seminar.

15 September 2014
Doug has been invited to give the RIT Physics Colloquium on 8 October.

26 June 2014
Doug and Jesse will teach engineering to inner-city high school students in July as part of University of Rochester's Upward Bound program. How to make engineering real? Have the students build race cars powered only by mousetraps!

13 June 2014
Doug has been invited to speak about our advection-reaction-diffusion experiments at this summer's Turbulent Mixing & Beyond Workshop at the Abdus Salaam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy.

4 June 2014
Doug has been invited to visit Technische Universitat Ilmenäu in Germany this summer to talk about electromagnetic mixing in liquid metal flows.

27 May 2014
A warm welcome goes out to the undergraduate researchers joining the group for summer 2014: Tianyi Liu, Kelsey Sahinen-Pedroso, and Thomas Ryan Smith. Tianyi and Kelsey will work on mixing in double-gyre flows, and Ryan will study how incorporating large-scale energy storage affects the stability of electrical grids.

22 May 2014
Congratulations go today to Jesse, who successfully completed his PhD comprehensive exam.

22 May 2014
Doug has been invited to speak this summer at the Institute for Engineering Thermodynamics at the German Aerospace Center in Stuttgart. The topic: how fluid mixing affects grid-scale energy storage.

20 May 2014
Our paper Mixing in a liquid metal electrode has been published in Physics of Fluids.

18 May 2014
Big congratulations go to Diego and to all of Doug's ME 205 students, who graduated today. Nice work everybody! Diego goes on to a process engineer position with Intel, and we wish him the best.

8 May 2014
See our work on quantifying collective motion of cells among the New Journal of Physics Highlights of 2013.

1 May 2014
We're delighted to have PhD student Jesse Cramer transitioning into the group this summer. Jesse will work on advection-reaction-diffusion experiments as a model for oceanic phytoplankton growth and mixing.

23 April 2014
Our paper Searching for effective forces in laboratory insect swarms has been published in Scientific Reports.

8 February 2014
Doug will present a poster on liquid metal batteries at the APS Conference on the Physics of Sustainable Energy at University of California, Berkeley, in March.

21 October 2013
Doug has been invited to attend the Mixing, Transport, and Coherent Structures workshop at the Mathimatisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach in Germany in January. He will present a poster there on our liquid metal batteries work.

20 September 2013
Doug will speak about mixing in liquid metal batteries at APS Division of Fluid Dynamics conference in Pittsburgh in November.

18 September 2013
Warm welcomes go out to the student researchers joining the group, including Rachel Bierasinski, Diego De La Cruz, Adalberto Perez, and James Powers. Rachel will work toward a Master's thesis exploring three-dimensional particle tracking with plenoptic cameras. Diego is also a Masters student, and will work on building liquid metal battery experiments. James and Beto are juniors and will be building our lab from scratch!

13 September 2013
Doug has been invited to give the Condensed Matter and Biological Physics Seminar at Syracuse on Friday, 7 February, where he will talk about quantifying collective motion.

11 September 2013
Doug has been invited to give the RIT Applied Math Seminar in October. He will speak about collective motion in cells and insects.

13 August 2013
Doug has been invited to give the U of R Astronomy & Astrophysics Colloquium in September. He will speak about mixing in astrophysical and geophysical contexts, focusing on Lagrangian Coherent Structures and inertial waves.

8 August 2013
Our recent paper on Lagrangian Coherent Structures has been highlighted in Phys. Rev. E Kaleidoscope.

26 July 2013
Three of our figures will be exhibited at the Memorial Art Gallery Clothesline Festival. Good science is beautiful, and good data is art!