01
Bacterial upstream invasion
Flagellated bacteria swim against ambient flow and invade microstructured devices through hydrodynamic boundary interactions. We resolve the geometry-dependent transport that funnels swimmers into confined channels.
Themes
Research
The physics of living, swimming matter — how cells navigate flow, geometry, and chemistry, and how we engineer environments to study them.
02
Complex fluids & rheotaxis
Polymeric, viscoelastic, and macromolecular fluids dramatically enhance bacterial upstream swimming. We disentangle the rheological and hydrodynamic contributions to collective rheotactic behavior.
03
Nitric oxide & biofilm dispersal
NO rapidly switches V. cholerae from sessile biofilm to a hyper-motile state, accelerating dispersal — quantified with microfluidic flow assays and high-speed tracking.
04
Topological separation of active matter
Periodic microfluidic lattices act as topological filters for bacterial active matter, separating swimmers by trajectory winding and persistence length.
05
Multiflagellarity & morphology
Cell shape and flagellar number jointly govern upstream invasion success. We map a morphology phase diagram for bacterial transport in flow.
06
Antimicrobial resistance diagnostics
Microfluidic AMR phenotyping for urinary tract infections — fast, single-cell readouts of resistance in clinically relevant strains.