On Shun Pak
Santa Clara University, CA·Engineering
At the scale of bacteria and cells, water behaves less like a flowing liquid and more like thick syrup, so swimming and moving payloads follow unusual physical rules. Understanding these rules can explain how microbes spread through their surroundings and could help engineers deliver drugs to precise spots in the body.
- Fields
Engineering
Biophysics
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
bacterial motility
bacterial swimming
fluid dynamics
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Use robophysical models, robots that mimic swimming bacteria, together with theory to determine how non-Newtonian fluid behaviors such as shear thinning or elasticity change bacterial swimming.
- Characterize how bacteria swim near surfaces and how neighboring swimmers interact through the fluid, using robot experiments to test theoretical predictions of hydrodynamic interactions.
- Examine how self-propelled active particles enclosed inside lipid vesicles drive vesicle motion toward targeted locations, combining experiments and theoretical modeling.
- Develop a light-triggered, non-contact way to rupture lipid vesicles and release their contents, then combine it with active propulsion in a test-tube platform for directed drug delivery.
More about the research
The lab's two collaborative projects combine theory and experiments to study how fluid forces shape the motion of microscopic swimmers and self-propelled carriers.
Why it matters
Bacterial motility underlies colonization and infection, so clarifying the physics of bacterial swimming in mucus-like fluids and near surfaces could support future biomedical and technological advances. Active lipid vesicles that steer to a target and release drugs on a light signal could lay groundwork for more precise therapeutic delivery systems.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Harishankar Manikantan
University of California-Davis, CA·Engineering·Early-career
Use asymptotic theory to calculate hydrodynamic interactions between pairs of particles in realistic non-Newtonian interfaces, including membranes and monolayers whose resistance to flow changes with deformation.
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.
Jonathan Rothstein
University of Massachusetts, MA·Engineering
Measure how self-propelled Marangoni surfers move on levitating spherical water drops in microgravity aboard the International Space Station, focusing on how the drop's overall curvature changes their propulsion.
The school
Santa Clara University: 8 labs on PI Pages, $8M a year on research, 24 research doctorates a year.
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