The Department of Mathematics & Statistics would like to welcome:
Dr. Jun Zhang on Tuesday, November 13 at 4:00pm in SCP 229.
Title: Understanding biological locomotion in fluids: swimming and flying
Abstract: Flying birds and swimming fish are familiar sights to everyone, but their remarkable locomoting mechanisms are often poorly understood. Inspired by these examples, we investigate experimentally the interactions between unsteady flows and dynamic boundaries (here flapping wings or fins). In one experiment, we study the functional origin of flapping flight and investigate how finite flexibility of a wing determines the flight speed and even the flight direction. In another experiment, we investigate the group dynamics of multiple locomotors as they interact with each other through the passing flows. These experiments have offered a few surprises.
Dr. Jun Zhang is the co-director of the Applied Math Laboratories and is a Professor of Physics and Mathematics at NYU. He received his Ph.D. in Physics at Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen and also studied at Racah Institute, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His postdoctoral work was at Libchaber Lab, Rockefeller University and Courant Institute, New York University. As co-director of the AML, research efforts have involved not only graduate students and post-docs, but also talented undergraduate students and even high school students to expose them to active research programs. His research interests include biomechanics (biological locomotion), geophysical dynamics (thermal convection, continental drift models), dynamical boundary problems in fluid flows (dynamics of flapping flags), self-organizing phenomena at microscopic and macroscopic scales, pattern formation in complex systems, just to name a few.