Laura Miller
University of Arizona, AZ·Mathematics & Statistics
Many small sea animals feed by catching particles from moving water with branched, bristled or hairy structures. Others coat themselves in mucus that shapes how they interact with their surroundings.
- Fields
Mathematics & Statistics
Ecology & Evolution
Biophysics
- Topics
biofluid dynamics
filter feeding
mesoscale flow
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Develop a Method of Regularized Oseenlets, a gridless numerical method, to compute flow through bristled filtering structures at Reynolds numbers near one, where viscous and inertial forces are balanced.
- Create grid-independent force-spreading operators for the immersed boundary method, along with tools to simulate swimming agents that interact with moving, complex 3D boundaries.
- Use sensitivity analysis and uncertainty quantification to find which flow and behavior parameters control how cnidarians capture plankton, including randomly moving (Brownian) swimmers and groups of prey.
- Measure how Cassiopea jellyfish mucus affects the swimming of planktonic prey and of cassiosomes (released stinging-cell clusters), using mathematical and engineering tools to characterize the mucus.
- Track changes in Cassiopea's range with eDNA and field sampling, and profile venom and mucus proteins across seasonal temperatures with Nanopore RNA sequencing.
More about the research
These questions sit where fluid physics meets biology. They matter for understanding why coral reefs struggle while jellyfish are spreading. The research combines mathematical and computational modeling of flow with biological measurements. It focuses on cnidarians, the group that includes corals and jellyfish.
Why it matters
More than half of living coral reefs have been lost in recent decades, while jellyfish blooms have increased. Understanding how corals capture food and how jellyfish mucus and venom help Cassiopea spread could clarify these shifts in marine ecosystems. The open-source flow software could also apply to other biological filters, such as fish gills and the chemical sensors of insects and crabs, and to bioinspired filter designs.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Robert Guy
University of California-Davis, CA·Mathematics & Statistics
Measure flow patterns and forces on dynamically similar remotely operated vehicles to test how metachronal rowing, a back-to-front wave of paddle strokes, generates thrust and lift across paddle Reynolds numbers from 0.01 to 10,000.
Xiang Cheng
University of Minnesota, MN·Engineering
Engineer a fluorescent bacterial strain with tunable swimming speed and tumble frequency, and image single cells inside dense suspensions to link individual swimming to local turbulent flow and test competing active-matter theories.
Boyce Griffith
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Mathematics & Statistics
Develop grid-adapted quadrature rules matched to composite B-spline coupling functions so that immersed boundary simulations transfer forces and velocities between fluid and structure more accurately in 2D and 3D.
The school
University of Arizona: 36 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 487 research doctorates a year.
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