Hydrodynamics of Swimming Microorganisms
Jeffrey Guasto MIT
[email protected] 570 881 8464
Arezoo Ardekani, University of Notre Dame
[email protected]
(Mechanics of Fluids and Thermal Systems)
This one-day mini-symposium at the SES 2013 meeting will focus on the core challenges and recent advancements in understanding the hydrodynamics of swimming microorganisms. The rapid advancement in this highly multidisciplinary field has emerged from the growing need to address both fundamental and applied issues for an array of problems including human health, ecology and the environment, and engineering problems such as biofuel production. During this minisymposium, we will allocate time for five to eight 30-minute long invited talks by world-renowned experts representing diverse backgrounds from engineering, physics, mathematics and biology and providing a broad perspective on the current state-of-the-art in both experimental and theoretical aspects of microscale biolocomotion. These invited seminars as well as a number of contributed talks will focus on topics related to the hydrodynamics and biomechanics of swimming microscopic organisms including bacterial locomotion, undulatory swimming mechanics, motility in complex fluids, collective dynamics of interacting motile cells, and the transport properties of active cell suspensions. The fusion of ideas and techniques by theorists and experimentalists from different backgrounds will provide the potential for significant impact on our understanding of these microscale active flow phenomena.