Guasto Lab

Prof. Guasto recently present experimental work by Derek Walkama on elastic instabilities and transport by viscoelastic flows through porous media. This research is in collaboration with Arezoo Ardekani’s group at Purdue and was presented at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Sciences, which hosted a virtual workshop on Viscoelastic Flow Instabilities and Elastic Turbulence.

Collaborative work from the Guasto Lab was recently published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. In this paper, analysis of high-speed imaging data reveals the underlying mechanical relationships between the flagellar waveform patterns of sperm, which is strikingly different from their genetic relationships.

Allen recently defended his MS thesis work on optical measurements of aerogel mechanics … congratulations Allen!

Derek Walkama was recently awarded the John F. Burlingame Graduate Fellowship from Tufts for the 2020-2021 academic year, which recognizes outstanding achievement by graduate students in Physics. Congratulations Derek!

A recent article titled “Disorder Suppresses Chaos” from Tufts University School of Engineering News highlights work from our group! The piece elaborates on our article recently published in Physical Review Letters on how geometrical disorder in microstructured systems such as porous media dictates the transition to unstable flow in viscoelastic fluids.

Congratulations to PhD student Derek Walkama and former postdoc Nicolas Waisbord on the publication of their recent paper at Physical Review Letters! Their microfluidic experiments explore the role of geometrical disorder in the onset of viscoelastic instabilities: They show a counterintuitive effect whereby introducing disorder stabilizes the fluid flow and staves off chaotic flow instabilities.

Amin Dehkharghani was just awarded the 2020 School of Engineering Graduate Outstanding Academic Scholarship Award as a PhD student in the Tufts University School of Engineering. This award is due in no small part to Amin’s fantastic publications in PNAS and Lab on a Chip. Congratulations again Amin!

In collaboration with Arezoo Ardekani’s group at Purdue, Derek measurements of marine invertebrate sperm buckling in microfluidic flows were published in combined numerical/experimental work. The paper can be found here.

Derek and Michael along with Prof. Guasto attended the APS DFD meeting in Seattle, where they presented their latest work.

Amin Dehkharghani’s paper on yeast quantification and adhesion-based separation using microfluidics was published in Lab on a Chip. This work was in collaboration with Prof. Steve Fuchs and Kristina Reinmets from the Dept. of Biology at Tufts.