Faculty

Aleks Donev's expertise is in the areas of applied and computational mathematics, computational materials science, and computational physics. He works on developing algorithms that accelerate or systematically coarse-grain traditional methods such as Molecular Dynamics or (Kinetic) Monte Carlo, as well as multi-scale (hybrid) methods combining particle with stochastic (fluctuating) coarse-grained models. His present focus is on fluid dynamics at small scales, and in particular, fluctuating hydrodynamics and colloidal suspensions.

Miranda Holmes-Cerfon is applied mathematician, who uses and develops tools to address problems in science and engineering. Her mathematical work draws on many areas of pure and applied mathematics, but areas of particular interest include stochastic analysis, statistical mechanics, computational geometry, and rigidity theory. Her past areas of application include materials science, fluid dynamics, soft-matter physics, geophysics, and oceanography. Her curent work is mainly focused on building the theoretical and computational tools to study nano- or micro-scale particles or materials building blocks, with the aim of identifying which structures or materials can be assembled efficiently.

Charlie Peskin is a world leader in mathematical modeling and computer simulation, with special expertise on applications in the biomedical sciences. He is the creator of the
immersed boundary (IB) method, which has grown from a method to study the fluid dynamics of heart valves and cardiac flows to a generally useful tool for fluid-structure interactions. In addition to fluid interactions, the heart modeling effort now encompasses realistic fiber architecture of the muscular heart walls and electro-mechanical couplings. The IB method has also been applied to small-scale phenomena, such as the dynamics of bacterial flagella and the collective motion of micro-swimmer suspensions. Beyond IB, recent studies in Peskin's group pertain to stochastic gene expression, the mammalian circadian clock, the role of flexibility in chromosome transport, among many others.

Leif Ristroph is an experimental physicist and applied mathematician who specializes in fluid dynamics, with a particular emphasis on fluid-structure interactions as applied to biological and geophysical flows. His biophysical work includes studies of the aerodynamics and stabilization of insect flight as well as the hydrodynamics of schooling and flow-sensing in swimming fish. Relevant to geophysical flows, he is interested in problems ranging from instabilities of interfacial flows to the evolution of shape during fluid mechanical erosion.

Esteban Tabak works in various areas of applied mathematics, including Fluid Dynamics, Data Science and Optimization. His recent work in fluid dynamics has been mostly concerned with the physical and numerical modeling of large-scale flows applied to understanding the dynamics of the Atmosphere and the Ocean. In data science, he has developed new tools in density estimation and optimal transport and applied them to general problems in classification, regression, clustering and time-series analysis. In optimization, he has developed a new general methodology to solve constrained optimization problems, both continuous and discrete, through a dynamical two-person game with evolving strategies represented by the primal and dual variables.