Adapted from Sammy Katta: https://sammykatta.com/diversity
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 squishy and biomechanics related from The College of New Jersey (TCNJ), led by Nick Battista, an associate professor in the Mathematics and Statistics Department.
Our central research focus currently is unraveling the swimming performance of a variety of marine invertebrates and pushing their modes of locomotion to their absolute limits (no critters are harmed in our computational models); however, we investigate many other interesting phenomena in biomechanics, math physiology, and fluid-structure interactions.
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. In particular we primarily use his software package, IB2d, for studying fluid-structure interaction problems, which allows for a robust construction of an immersed boundary.
OUR LATEST RESEARCH
A recent focus of our lab is studying the limitations of different swimming strategies using a blend of computational fluid dynamics models, 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.
Part of our research has been developing computational tools that help decrease the learning curve for students and scientists, who have minimal programming experience, to perform fluid-structure interaction models and other CFD simulations at an accelerated rate.
BIOINSPIRATION LAB NEWS!
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Our collaborative manuscript on Multiscale Flow Between the Branches and Polyps of Gorgonians was accepted into the Journal of Experimental Biology! Thanks for letting us be apart of this work. Check it out here!
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Welcome to the lab Lauren Terr! Lauren is exploring swimming performance for pelagic polychaetes like Tomopteris!
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Welcome to the lab Anna Dorval! Anna is creating a polynomial chaos expansion toolkit for doing swimming performance predictions during the TCNJ MUSE program.
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Our manuscript on Planktos, an agent-based modeling framework that integrates fluid dynamics, was accepted in Bulletin of Mathematical Biology! Thanks for letting us be apart of this work, Christopher Strickland (UTK). Check it out here!
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Congrats to all recent and former lab members Miruna Baciu, John Phelan, Zain Moin, Lilly Hoffman, Rose Pereira, Spencer Haber, Stephanie Shen, and Natalia Sokolnicki on graduating from TCNJ!
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Our collaborative manuscript on how the presence of a substrate can strengthen the upward jet by upside down jellyfish been accepted for publication, in Frontiers in Marine Science! Check it out here!
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Our collaborative manuscript on implementing concentration dynamics into the IB2d library has been accepted for publication, in Bioinspiration & Biomimetics! Check it out here!
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Congratulations to Jason Miles whose first-author manuscript, Exploring the sensitivity in jellyfish locomotion under variations in scale, frequency, and duty cycle, was just accepted into the Journal of Mathematical Biology! Check it out here!
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Congratulations to Tierney Baldwin whose first-author manuscript, Hopscotching Jellyfish: combining different duty cycle kinematics can lead to enhanced performance, was just accepted into the journal Bioinspiration & Biomimetics! Check-it-out-here!
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Welcome to the lab Eileen Yizzi and Lilly Hoffman!
They will creating a kinematic mathematical model of a lionsmane jellyfish that will be integrated into the IB2d library!
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Lana's research featured on TCNJ website: Check-it-out-here!
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September 14, 2021: Come check out some members of the lab present at the MUSE Poster Sessions! We will be showcasing 2 on-going projects!
Lana Abdelmohsen: How much can neural networks learn about jellyfish?
Kendra Ebke: When it is good to be out of sync: copepod and marine snow interactions
