Biological Fluid Dynamics

Fluids are ubiquitous in biological systems, so it is not surprising that fluid dynamics should play an important role in the physical and chemical processes shaping development and evolution of life forms. It is becoming increasingly clear that the number of genes in the genome of a typical organism is not sufficient to specify the minutiae of all features of its ontogeny. Instead, genetics often acts as a choreographer, guiding development but leaving some aspects to be controlled by physical and chemical means. However, only in a few cases have the strands been teased apart to see exactly how fluid forces operate to guide these processes.

The scope of my research is to address fundamental problems and cross-disciplinary applications of the motion of bodies immersed in fluid flows. In the last few years I have been specifically interested in the life, motility, development and evolution of aquatic microorganisms using in my research a combination of theoretical and experimental approaches borrowed from modern fluid mechanics, microscopy and dynamical systems theory together with biochemical and cell biological techniques.

The cross-disciplinary cooperation between physics and biology is a particularly exciting enterprise with the potential, not only to progress to the solution of long-standing problems in the life sciences, but also to motivate genuinely new physics.

InFiBiO group web: https://imedea.uib-csic.es/infibio/