Fluid Mechanics and Analytical Modelling for Biology and Physics

Project ID: 2531bd1682

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Research Area(s): fluid dynamics and aerodynamics
mathematical biology
nonlinear systems

UCL Lead department: Mathematics

Lead Supervisor: Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck

Project Summary:

The project will develop mathematical and computational tools to study the behaviour of fluids and related systems in physical and biological settings. Applications include the following areas:

Geophysical Fluid Dynamics – large-scale atmospheric circulation, atmospheric blocking events, rotating stratified flows, coastal flows and their impact on ecology and fisheries, vortex motion, topographical effects on geophysical flows, dynamics of baroclinic waves and atmospheric chemistry.
High Reynolds Number Asymptotics - flow instability, receptivity, laminar-turbulent transition in two- and three-dimensional unsteady flows, rapid flows past bluff bodies with applications to car, airplane and helicopter performance, flow separation and detached shear layers, two-fluid boundary layers, branching flows and networks.
Polymer flows, Suspensions and Droplets - flow instabilities in non-Newtonian fluid flow, shear-banding in entangled systems, suspensions of solid particles or bubbles in Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids. Waves and Free-Boundary Problems – propagation and scattering of nonlinear dispersive waves and eddies, wave propagation in complex media.
Global properties of dynamical systems models in ecology, the study of evolutionary games and evolutionary dynamics. Modelling in biomedicine, including multi-scale modelling of the immune system and proteasomal degradation, genetic synthetic engineering, the theory of noise-induced phenomena in spatially distributed systems, including applications to bone modelling.
Modelling the control of blood circulation in the brain and in the placenta.
Mathematical models of embryonic development, in particular of the neural tube and neuronal differentiation.
Use of mechanistic modelling to understand a wide range of emergent physical and biological phenomena in areas including: biological signalling, carbon recycling, cell motility, cryopreservation, decontamination, synthetic biology, and tissue engineering.
The systems biology of cancer, include modelling metastasis, improving early diagnosis and new oncomarkers for women’s cancers, new DNA methylation network measures and new DNA methylation intra-gene measures to improve cancer diagnostics.

There is close collaboration with experimental, biological, and medical groups.