News

Invited talks (Sept 09)

Prof. Peacock will be in Europe at the start of October giving invited seminars at Ladhyx (Paris), DTU (Copenhagen) and the University of Cambridge.

Fall teaching (Sept 09)

Prof. Peacock will be teaching his intro Nonlinear Dynamics course 2.050J in the Fall. This course is designed to introduce undergraduates to the basic concepts of maps, flows, chaos and bifurcations, among many other things. The course will involve demos and use of java applets to help illustrate the ideas.

Graduation (Aug 09)

Congratulations to Dr. Paula Echeverri on her recent and successful defense of her Ph.D. thesis on "Internal Tide Generation by Tall Ocean Ridges". The thesis involved a combination of theory, experiment and processing of ocean data, and has produced three JFM papers (one accepted, two submitted). Paula joined the group in 2004 after her undergraduate degree in Aero/Astro at MIT, and completed her Masters in summer 2006. During her time in the ENDLab Paula went to sea twice, to Hawaii and the South China Sea, and ultimately graduated from the MIT/WHOI Joint Program. We're very sorry to see her go, and very proud of what she has achieved. Hasta luego, Paula.

USNCTAM 2010 (Aug 09)

The deadline for abstracts for USNCTAM 2010 is Oct 15th 2009. Prof. Peacock and Prof. Rowley (Princeton) are co-chairing a session on Nonlinear Dynamics, for which submissions are welcome. The meeting is perhaps the most prestigious US conference on Mechanics, and is held only once every four years. Contact Prof. Peacock if you are interested and need more specific details. Here is the link to the conference website. [link] Contact Prof. Peacock if you are interested and need more specific details.

Welcome New Members (Aug 09)

Two new members have joined the group; Sasan Saidi (Masters) and Arezoo Ardekani (Postdoc). Sasan recently graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and will be working on internal waves. Arezoo completed her Ph.D. at UC Irvine and received a Schlumerger Faculty of the Future Fellowship; and luckily for us she chose to come to work in Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Arezoo will be working on a new form of propulsion in aquatic environments. We also eagerly anticipate the arrival of Matthieu Mericer (Postdoc) from ENS de Lyon, who will be joining the group in Summer 2010. There is the small matter of him finishing his Ph.D. thesis first though, so knuckle down Matthieu and make sure to keep Thierry happy.

Discovery Channel Filming (Aug 09)

A spectacular image of the
Morning Glory of the Gulf of
Carpentaria, obtained from a
quick search on Google.

At the end of September, Prof. Peacock will be heading to Burketown in North Australia to surf the Morning Glory in a glider, as part of an upcoming documentary on internal waves. The morning glory is one of the most spectacular celestial phenomenon, and more can be learned about it at this website. [link]

This follows previous shoots in the South China Sea and Western Australia. The documentary is scheduled for completion and broadcast in 2010.

Invited talks (May/June 09)

A busy start to the summer, with Prof. Peacock giving invited seminars at Caltech, UCSD, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and UC Santa Cruz, and also one of the invited talks at the Gordon Conference on Nonlinear Science.

Past Spotlights

Separation is so tough (Oct 08)

© 2009 Thomas Peacock
The cover image from the MIT
website, showing a slightly altered
flow separation spike visualized
using green fluorescent dye.

Congratulations to Matthew Weldon, after his recent Masters graduation, for the acceptance of his paper on unsteady separation in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. The paper presents exciting new experimental work that demonstrates the ability of a new approach to unsteady separation based on ideas from dynamical systems theory. The paper was featured on the cover of the MIT website and the press release was one of the top three accessed on the MIT website in 2008. [link] This work was also featured in Physics World and La Recherche, and will be in an upcoming article in the New York Times. Matthew is now working in the Fluid Dynamics Labs at Penn State University.

Read the article. [link]

The Lagrangian skeleton of turbulence (Mar 07)

Mani Mathur, from the ENDLab, has published his work on uncovering Lagrangian Coherent Structures in an experimental data set of turbulent flow. Mani's work provides a new robust methodology for finding these hidden structures that govern mixing and transport in fluid flows. This research was featured on the cover of the MIT website, and made the cover of PRL. The associated press release can be found here. [link]

Read the article. [link]