This grant supports travel of graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, junior faculty, and under-represented participants to attend the conference entitled ?Active Fluids: Bridging Complex Fluids and Biofluids? from January 27- February 1, 2014 at the Aspen Center for Physics, Aspen, Colorado. Research in active fluids is multidisciplinary, encompassing many branches in physics, mathematics, and engineering, including fluid mechanics, hard and soft condensed matter physics, polymer physics and engineering, continuum mechanics, complex fluids, biologically inspired engineering, statistical physics, and high-performance computing. The conference will foster cross-fertilization of ideas among researchers with an interest in the areas of complex and non-Newtonian fluids on one hand, and biological fluids on the other, within the common theme of active fluids. The schedule consists of informal in-depth lectures and discussions, with a large number of contributed oral and poster presentations. The scope includes but is not restricted to addressing questions such as: How to model active fluids? How to experimentally capture the range of time and length scales in prototypical active fluids? How to adapt these techniques to the study of active matter which typically requires resolution at both the nano scale and at the continuum level?
Approximately 85-100 participants in total are anticipated. The broader impacts of the Conference include forming a nucleus of new contacts and collaborations that could potentially result in future transformative works, raising awareness in a variety of key scientific communities regarding the state-of-the-art techniques with great potential in biofluidic studies, providing novel insights about the role of fluid dynamics in biomedical applications, and envisioning new scenarios to address environmental concerns.
Intellectual Merit Active fluids encompasses many branches of physics, including hard and soft condensed matter physics, polymer physics and engineering, continuum mechanics, biologically inspired engineering, statistical physics, and high-performance computing. This conference fostered cross-fertilization of ideas among groups of researchers. Our schedule consisted of informal in-depth lectures and discussions, with a number of invited and contributed talks and posters, listed below: "Swimming in Newtonian and Viscoelastic Fluids" by Arshad Kudrolli. "Hydrodynamic interaction of swimming microorganisms in complex fluids", by Arezoo Ardekani. "Flagellar Kinematics & Swimming Behavior of Algal Cells in Viscoelastic Fluids", by Paulo Arratia. "Swimming of wavy sheets in viscoelastic fluids" by Alexander Morozov. "Elasticity and Swimming" by Kenneth Breuer. "Shear banding and interfaces in non-Newtonian fluids", by Peter Olmsted. "Thermodynamics and Kinetics of Single Biomolecules in Simple and Complex Fluids", by John Kasianowicz. "How the Dynamics of Vesicle and Capsule Suspensions in Flow May Affect Your Bleeding Time", by Eric Shaqfeh. "Simulation of active processes in cellular blood flow in tight confines", by Jonathan Freund. "First clues to understand red blood cell interactions: numerical studies of vesicle suspensions", by Marine Thiébaud. "Bacteria as active colloids", by Wilson Poon. "Active Fluids on Surfaces", by Mike Shelley. "Bacteria as active fluids", by Gerard Wong. "Spontaneous ordering of a bacterial drop into a spiral vortex", by Enkeleida Lushi. " Simulation of collective behaviour in micro-scale swimmers with intrinsic de-correlation mechanisms", by Deepak Krishnamurthy. "Dynamics of Active Nematics", by Cristina Marchetti. "Modeling the microscopic dynamics of actively streaming microtubule suspensions", by Meredith D. Betterton. "Active suspensions in confinement", by David Saintillan. "Flagella synchronize through hydrodynamic interactions", by Douglas Brumley. "Hydrodynamics and control of microbial locomotion", by Jorn Dunkel. "Colloidal and bacterial surface motility", by Jure Dobnikar. "Self-organized activity of molecular motors on beating cilia", by Ashok Sangani. "Amoeboid Swimming: A Generic Self-Propulsion of Cells in Fluids by Means of Membrane Deformations", by Chaouqi Misbah. "Phase behavior, hydrodynamics and rheology of active suspensions", by Suzanne Fielding. "Diffusion of foreign particles in complex fluids", by Christel Hohenegger. "Micro- and Macro-rheology of Chlamydomonas suspensions", by Christian Helmut Wagner. "Microfluidic flows of E. coli suspensions", by Ankle Lindner. "Swimming droplets: squirmers, topological droplets and their collective dances", by Shashi Thutupalli. "Collective Motion of Catalytic Artificial Swimmers", by Jonathan Posner. "Controlling an active swarm with an external field", by Vladimir Lobaskin. "The Five S’s: Chemical Swimming, Sailing, Surfing, Squirming and Swarming", by John Brady. "Individual and collective surfing of chemically active particles", by Hassan Masoud. "The Mechanism of Shape Instability for a Vesicle in Extensional Flow", by Vivek Narsimhan. "Mixing and Transport by Ciliary Carpets", by Eva Kanso. "Swimming through heterogeneous networks", by Henry Fu. "Mechanics and evolution in bacterial biofilms", by Knut Drescher. "A living organism as a 2D active fluid", by Manu Prakash. " The lateral line system of fish as a "hydrodynamic antenna", by Jun Zhang. "Synchronous Droplet Microfluidics: One "Clock" to rule them all", by Georgios Katsikis. "Inertio-elastic focusing of bioparticles in microchannels at ultra-high throughput", by Thomas Ober. "Self-propulsion of an inextensible elastic membrane in an electric field", by Yuan-Nan Young. "Complex dynamics of surface-adsorbed particles in electric fields", by Petia Vlahovska In addition to the above oral presentations, a public lecture and 33 posters were presented by graduate students, postdocs, and junior faculty. The abstracts are available atwww.math.vt.edu/people/renardyy/Aspen2014/program.html. Broader Impact Participation was encouraged by allocating the support provided by NSF towards airfare and/or conference registration fee of 28 applicants, mostly postdocs and graduate student. Furthermore, this conference was designed to actively attract the under-represented groups, mainly women in science (~20% women participants), not only by advocating participation but also by setting a unique example of leadership, having women scientists serving in the organizing and advisory committees. Women participation was well above the number of female faculties in physics which was reported as 14% in 2010. This conference was accommodated with two public sessions (Physics café where two enthusiastic physicists interacted with public and a recorded public lecture on "Swimming in Syrup: How do bacteria move?" by Kenneth Breuer) (http://vod.grassrootstv.org/cablecast/public/Show.aspx?ChannelID=1&ShowID=12264), engaging the public audience. These informal sessions were aimed at increasing awareness on the current challenges of the scientific research on active fluids and soft matter and the applications in daily life. The Aspen Center for Physics and KDNK community radio in Carbondale joined with local physics students to interview a physicist for a half hour show for Radio Physics. The interviews are available atwww.kdnk.org/publicaffairs.cfm?mode=detail&id=1354135724118. Finally, this conference was concluded by a panel discussion on the future direction of active fluids. This session has been videotaped and is available at http://www3.nd.edu/~aardekan/Aspen_Physics_Ardekani.mp4.
