Our group spans a number of disciplines and backgrounds.

Sahil Agarwal is an undergraduate in the Department of Mathematics, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati.  He began working on sea ice while a summer student at the Mathematical Institute at Oxford University and last summer at Yale.  He has analyzed albedo data to quantify annual, interannual and decadal variability and the intrinsic time scales viz., multifractality.  He will begin the PhD program in Applied Mathematics at Yale in the fall of 2012.

Tony Fragoso is a junior math/physics major doing experiments in turbulent entrainment picking up the effort from the previous work of Rachel Berkowitz and Becca Jackson. When he is not studying turbulence he is making while playing water polo.  In the summer of 2012 he is in Cambridge on a Tetelman Fellowship supported by Yale.

Andong He is a post doc who finished his PhD in 2011 at Penn State with Andrew Belmonte.  He used conformal methods to study interfacial fluid dynamics.   He then went to the ICERM at Brown and is starting at NORDITA in July 2012 and then moving to Yale in 2013.

Chris MacMinn joined us in Janauary of 2012 after having finished up his PhD at MIT in fluid mechanics and applied mathematics.  His thesis work with Ruben Juanes is on the physics of carbon dioxide storage with an emphasis on its migration and trapping after injection into saline aquifers.  He is a YCEI fellow.

Woosok Moon is a fourth year graduate student who is working on stochastic dynamics in general and bringing this work to bear on trying to understand the state and fate of Arctic sea ice.  He came to Yale after having done an M.Sc. at Penn State.

Rob Style  joined the group in late 2011 as a Bateman postdoctoral fellow.  He will arrive from the Mathematical Institute at Oxford University where he has studied the freezing and drying of colloidal suspensions and the asssociated patterns.  Prior to that he was a thesis student in Cambridge with Grae Worster where he studied the formation of frost flowers and other solidification phenomena.

Srikanth Toppaladoddi is a graduate student who arrived at Yale in the fall of 2011 to begin a thesis on geophysical fluid dynamics and turbulence.  He hails from Bangalore, where he did his M.S. in the Engineering Mechanics Unit of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research.

Qiwei Claire Xue is an undergraduate working on double diffusive processes associated with the directional solidification of ammonium-chloride mushy layers.  She is supported in the summer of 2012 by a Dean’s Fellowship.

During the last two years I have also supported and supervised the Yale Drop Team, an undergraduate research group exploring the implications of microgravity and hypergravity environments by flying on board NASA’s “Vomit Comet”.

Former members:

Latchezar Benatov, a graduate student in the Dept. of Physics, came to Yale from Dartmouth in 2003 to work on a summer project in which he studied the quantum electrodynamics of ice; because of the frequency dependent dielectric response of ice and water have a crossover in the ultraviolet (ice being more polarizable at high frequencies), there are macroscopic manifestations of the Casimir effect that influence the surface and interfacial melting of ice.  He is now back at Dartmouth.

Roxanne Carini is a senior applied mathematics major who did her senior thesis on the patterns that form when suspensions dry and why and under what conditions they fracture.  In the fall of 2011 she began a PhD in engineering at the University of Washington.

Andrew Cahoon was a graduate student in the Dept. of Physics who did his undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland.  He’s studied geometric models of crystal growth using classical string theory constrained by the statistical mechanics of molecular processes on surfaces.  He has taken a position teaching mathematics and physics at Colby-Sawyer College.

Rachel Berkowitz was a physics undergraduate who did her senior thesis on mixing in gravity currents as a diversion from her cycling activities.  She completed an MPhil at the University of Cambridge’s BP Institute with Andy Woods and Colm Caulfield, and is now pursuing the PhD.

Hendrik Hansen-Goos was a post doctoral research associate.  He did his thesis under Siegfried Dietrich at the MPI in Stuttgart where he used density functional theory and aspects of geometric measure theory to understand solvation free energies of proteins.  At Yale he studied models for the interaction of proteins, particularly antifreeze glycoproteins and other biopolymers, with the surface of ice, density functional theory and the premelting of ice.  This is part of a five year project to understand fundamental questions in astrobiology and it is supported by a Helmholtz Alliance Planetary Evolution and Life. He is now at the DLR’s Institute of Planetary Research in Berlin.

Becca Jackson was a physics senior who did her thesis on turbulence in gravity currents when she was not sailing.  In the fall of 2010 she went to graduate school in physical oceanography in the MIT/WHOI joint program.

Klaus Meiners, was a Gaylord Donnelley Fellow who completed his PhD in 2002 at the Institute for Polar Ecology in Kiel.  His interests are in sea ice biology and we work together onthe interplay between biological habitability of the pore space in ice and its physical manifestations and implications.  He is now at the Antarctic CRC in Tasmania.  We are collaborating on a project “Evolution of Biogenic Exopolymer Concentrations and Interaction with  Physical Structure in Arctic Sea Ice” with Christopher Krembs and Dale Winebrenner at the University of Washington.

Jerome Neufeld defended his thesis in November 2007 and he is now at the BP Institute, DAMTP and Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge where he is a University Lecturer and a Royal Society University Research Fellow.  He is also a Fellow in physics at St. Catharines College Cambridge.   Previous to this he was a Lloyd’s Tercentenary Fellow working on the fluid mechanics of carbon sequestration with Herbert Huppert and solidification problems with Grae Worster.   He came to Yale with an MS in Physics from the University of Toronto. His thesis focused on the thermodynamics of sea ice and their interaction with fluid mechanics.  His studies combine theory, numerics and experimentation.

Michael Patterson was an Associate Research Scientist after having done his PhD in Bristol and then experimental work in Cambridge.  He is a fluid dynamicist interested in basic questions regarding mixing and instabilities.   He is now a lecturer in Engineering Hydraulics at Bath.

Stephen Peppin was a post doc who began in after having done his PhD and postdoctoral work Cambridge with Grae Worster. He is interested in basic questions concering the solidification of colloidal suspensions and nonequilibrium thermodynamics.   As of October 2008 he has begun a five year Research Fellowship in the newly created Oxford Centre for Cooperative Applied Mathematics in the Mathematical Institute at Oxford University.

Alan Rempel, was a post doctoral associate who completed his PhD with Grae Worster in the Department of Applied Mathematics & Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge, on the dynamics of premelted films, and is working on generalizations and extensions of this workas well as pursuing new geophysical implications.  Most recently we have worked on constructing a continuum mechanical description of frost heave using the microscopic dynamics of premelted films and on the diffusionof soluble impurities and isotopes in ice sheets.   Alan since taught applied mathematics and did research with Jim Rice at Harvard and is now on the faculty at the University of Oregon.

Adit Sreenivasan, was a student at Choate Rosemary Hall and he worked in the Fluid Dynamics Laboratory on aspects of convection in stratified and unstratified fluids and in odd geometries.   The basic apparatus consists of a table top double walled tank.  The geometry can be modified and the system is heated from below.  Here is an example of a run in which a dense (green) lower layer eventually undergoes turbulent convection launched at the density interface, visualized by shadowgraph techniques.  More recent images of this work can be seen here.  He went off to Johns Hopkins University and studied neuroscience.

Melissa Spannuth was a graduate student who arrived at Yale from the University of Colorado where she did a BS in Physics and in Mathematics.  She’s interested the fundamental dynamics and thermodynamics driving frost heave. Her work harnessed x ray photon correlation spectroscopy of silica particles in ice.  This work is done at the Advanced Photon Source in collaboration with Simon Mochrie.  She is now a post doc working with Jaci Conrad at the University of Houston examining the phase behavior of colloids in confinement.

Erik Thomson  was a graduate student who came to Yale with an BS in Physics from the Bates College.  He is interested in the physics and geophysics of ice.  In his thesis work he is doing light scattering experiments to understand grain boundary melting in ice.  This work is done in collaboration with Larry Wilen.  In October of 2010 he moved to Sweden to do a post doc with Jan Pettersson in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Gothenburg.

Andrew Wells came to Yale to take up an interdepartmental Bateman postdoctoral fellowship after having done his PhD in Cambridge with Grae Worster.  He studied geophysical fluid dynamics with a particular emphasis on studying the interactions of buoyancy driven flow and phase change with applications in the polar oceans.  With Steven Orszag in applied mathematics we are exploring hybrid theoretical and computational methods in such problems.   He is now a Gibbs Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics.  In July 2012 he began as a University Lecturer in the subdepartment of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics in University of Oxford‘s Department of Physics and as a Fellow of Wolfson College.

Mathew Wells, was an Associate Research Scientist working in fluid dynamics with a particular emphasis on experimental work.  He did his PhD in the geophysical fluid dynamics group at Australian National University with Ross Griffiths and Stuart Turner and came to Yale after a post doctoral fellowship in the Fluid Dynamics Group at the Eindhoven Technical University in the Netherlands.  In Eindhoven Mathew worked on continually forced 2D turbulence. Mathew has taken up an assistant professorship at the University of Toronto.

Jin-Qiang Zhong came to Yale from the Physics Department at UCSB where he worked on rotating Rayleigh-Benard convection in Guenter Ahlers’ group for a few years following his PhD which he did at New York University with Jun Zhang in the Physics Department and in the Applied Mathematics Laboratory.   His thesis work focused on modeling the dynamics of a free boundary on turbulent thermal convection which exhibits a rich range of behavior.  In 2012 he joined the faculty in the Department of Physics at TongJi University in Shanghai, China.

Back to John’s Home Page