A fantastic lab presence and Brown presence at the 2023 American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics (APS/DFD) annual meeting in Washington DC.  According to Prof Tom Powers, there were 43 papers by members of the Center For Fluid Mechanics (not including collaborations) and one invited talk by an alumni of our research groups (Sevario Spagniole (who was a PostDoc with Tom and is now a Prof at U.Wisconsin ) gave a wonderful talk on liquid crystals.

From our lab, there we had a great presence with Kenny, Ronan, Eva, Anoop, Siyang, Alex, Eric, Xiaowei, PJ, and Brooke, as well as recent alumni Xiaozhou and Yuanhang, and future lab member, Pedro.

Check out the new paper on soft elastomeric membranes and their interactions with an oncoming flow. Our paper, led by lab alumni Varghese Mathai (now at UMass) and Asimanshu Das just appeared in Physics Review Letters

Congratulations to our former lab member, Yunxing Su who is moving to Colorado to start a new position at CU Boulder. Yunxing completed his PhD in our lab, but has stayed in Providence for the past few years as a Postdoc, first with Roberto Zenit  and then with Monica Willhelmus.  Bon Voyage on your relocation to the Rockies!!

As the summer winds up, we bid a fond farewell to several people:

Mareesa Islam, Tanner Diring and Jayna Rybner – our wonderful “Surfing Bird” REU students.  These three students spent the summer at Brown, visiting from UC Berkeley, U. Wisconsin and USC respectively and made a huge contribution to our bird flight research program. Thanks for everything!

Xiaozhou Fan – a valued and treasured member of the lab for the past five years. Xiaozhou received his PhD (in May) and is moving west to start as a Postdoc at Caltech.

Sakthi Swarrup – our wonderful Postdoc (working jointly with Sharon Swartz) whose Fulbright fellowship has ended. Sakthi has returned to India as a faculty member at the Vellore Institute of Technology.

Alberto Bortoni – Sharon Swartz’s PhD student –  has spent many hours on this side of campus, is an honorary member of the lab and co-designer of the “flapperoo”. Alberto defends his PhD next week (we assume it will be successful) and he will be returning to Mexico.

 Congratulations to our graduates: Yuanhang and Xiaozho who both received their PhDs.   Tommy and Jenya received their ScBs – congratulations to all!

It was great to celebrate the end of the academic year with all (or most) of the members of the Breuer Lab, the Swartz Lab  and the Breuer-Swartz labs.  Sharon and Kenny have been collaborating together, sharing students and pizza for over twenty years!

Lab members Siyang, Eric, Yuanhang (lab member, emeritus) and Kenny at the 2023 DisCoVor meeting in Breckenridge CO.

Congratulations to our Post Doc Xiaowei He who has accepted a tenure track faculty position at the University of Utah!  Xiaowei will start in January before heading out west!

Congratulations to Xiaozhou Fan who successfully defended his PhD thesis on Friday to a packed house!

Some new, and some long overdue welcomes to the lab.  Last September, we welcomed three new PhD students: Eva Erickson, Anoop Kiran and Ronan Gissler who joined the PhD program from Ga Tech, SUNY Buffalo and Tufts.  In January, we welcomed PJ Gaudio to the PhD program from U. Hartford, via Electric Boat; just this week, we welcomed Alex Gehrke – a new Post Doc – who just completed his PhD with Karen Mulleners at EPFL (Switzerland).  Welcome to all of you!