Adapted from Sammy Katta: https://sammykatta.com/diversity
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Some resources for furthering one's education on systemic racism in the US: link
The Bioinspiration Lab
Welcome! We are a lab interested in all things biomechanics from The College of New Jersey (TCNJ), led by Nick Battista, an associate professor in the Mathematics and Statistics Department.
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Our central research focus is unraveling the swimming performance of a variety of marine invertebrates using a blend of math modeling, computational fluid dynamics, and machine learning. We also investigate many other interesting phenomena in biomechanics, math physiology, and fluid-structure interactions.
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Nick is the creator and main contributor of a various numerical tools for research, teaching, and recreational purposes, which are available on his GitHub site. We regularly use his software package, IB2d, for studying fluid-structure interaction systems.
RESEARCH AREAS
A recent focus of our lab is studying the limitations and performance tradeoffs in different swimming strategies using a blend of computational fluid dynamics, machine learning, and organismal experiments. We are fortunate that TCNJ has its own HPC (ELSA) in which we use to perform our widespread locomotion studies.
In tandem, part of our research effort is developing (open-source) computational tools that decrease the learning curve for students and scientists to perform fluid-structure interaction models and other CFD simulations at an accelerated rate.
BIOINSPIRATION LAB NEWS!
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[April 2025] Congratulations to Manasvi, Joe, and Alberto for great poster presentations at TCNJ's 2025 Celebration of Student Achievement (COSA)
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[January 2025] Our manuscript Exploring the swimming performance and the physical mechanisms of Tomopteris locomotion was accepted and published in Bioinspiration & Biomimetics - check it out here!
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[November 2024] Our manuscript Ratcheting Fluid Pumps: using generalized polynomial chaos expansions to assess pumping performance and sensitivity was formally accepted into the journal Physics of Fluids. Congratulations to Zain Moin who started this work during the TCNJ MUSE program in Summer 2020. Great to see it finally published - check it out here!
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[August 2024] We were awarded an NSF Collaborative RUI Grant (#2410987) alongside collaborators Dr. Laura Miller (U. Arizona) and Dr. Christopher Strickland (U. Tennessee Knoxville) to study the fluid dynamics of organisms filtering particles at the mesoscale.
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[August 2024] Welcome to the group, Manasvi Mamilla! Manasvi is a rising 4th year biology major with a mathematics minor.
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[June 2024] Our collaborative manuscript Mixed uncertainty analysis on pumping by peristaltic hearts using Dempster–Shafer theory was accepted into the Journal of Mathematical Biology! Thanks for letting us be apart of this work. Check it out here!
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Nick was on Sabbatical for the 2023-2024 academic year. He spent it immersed in research, giving research talks, visiting collaborators, doing outreach, doing research dives, and spent most of it out at the Hatfield Marine Science Center.