LIFD Online Annual Lecture

Schedule (all times UK GMT, will be hosted on Zoom):

24th February 2021

16.00-16.45pm: Dr Sepideh Khodaparast "Growth of myelin figures from parent multilamellar droplets" & 1 speaker TBC

16.45-17.00pm: break

17.00-18.00pm: Prof Lisa Fauci keynote talk "Helical swimming and helical buckling — explorations in elastohydrodynamics at the microscale"

Keynote speaker Prof Lisa Fauci

Biography:

Prof Fauci is the Pendergraft Nola Lee Haynes Professor of Mathematics at Tulane University. She is extremely well known for her use of computational fluid dynamics to understand biological processes such as sperm motility, the neuromechanics of locomotion, and phytoplankton dynamics in the ocean. She is a co-founder of the Tulane Center for Computational Science, she obtained her PhD from the Courant Institute at NYU, and has been at Tulane University since 1986, with time visiting the University of Utah and the Courant Institute. Prof Fauci has received a number of awards; most notably she is a fellow of the American Physical Society and was elected by the Association for Women in Mathematics and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) to give the Kovalevsky Lecture in 2016 .

Abstract:

"Helical swimming and helical buckling — explorations in elastohydrodynamics at the microscale".The motion of passive or actuated elastic filaments in a fluid environment is a common element in many biological systems. Examples include diatom chains moving in the ocean, bacterial flagella propelling a cell body, cilia in pulmonary airways, and the polymers embedded in a viscous fluid whose microscopic behavior give rise to macroscopic rheological properties. In cases where these flexible filaments move through confined environments at zero Reynolds number, the confinement could have a dramatic effect upon the dynamics of the system. We will present results on the computational modeling of two such systems: the swimming of helical filaments in narrow tubes and the dynamics of actin-like fibers in straining flow.

The LIFD online Annual Lecture is held in honour of John Fox.