Education

I completed my Master's degree and Doctorate in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department (MAE) at the University of California, Irvine in 2002 and 2010, respectively. I was a student of Prof. Roger H. Rangel in the Multiphase Heat Transfer and Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (Fluids). During my graduate studies, I developed computational fluid dynamics solvers to explore fluid and solid structure interaction problems with biomedical applications. I recently completed a two year postdoctoral research program at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in the Linné Flow Centre in Stockholm, Sweden. During my postdoctoral work, I developed a two dimensional numerical model of a swimming green algal cell and participated in a research collaboration with TU-Delft in the Netherlands where I used a high precision parallelized fluid dynamics code to study the motion and nutrient uptake of model swimming microorganisms in suspension.

I began my engineering studies at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in the Environmental Engineering (ENVE) program and graduated with a Batchlor's degree in June 1998. My senior project was a semi-analytical investigation of the tranport of diluent plumes in groundwater which sparked my interest in the role of fluid dynamics on the spread of contaminants in the environment. I realized that a deep understanding of fluid mechanics was an important component of solving real world engineering problems. In particular, I became interested in learning more about the capabilities of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models to predict and evaluate fluid dynamics problems related to natural systems.