Flow Networks in Flux
- Speaker
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Eleni Katifori, Ph.D.Senior Research Scientist, Biological Transport Networks, CCB, Flatiron Institute
Standing Faculty, Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania
Presidential Lectures are a series of free public colloquia spotlighting groundbreaking research across four themes: neuroscience and autism science, physics, biology, and mathematics and computer science. These curated, high-level scientific talks feature leading scientists and mathematicians and are designed to foster discussion and drive discovery within the New York City research community. We invite those interested in these topics to join us for this weekly lecture series.
Transport webs span a broad range of length scales, from microns in the human microcirculation to kilometers in river networks. The structure of all these networks is mutable and subject to either gradual, irreversible change, as in the case of river evolution in geological timescales, or reversible change, as in the case of the adaptation of human circulation to a faster heart rate in mere seconds. These changes are frequently brought about by flow that runs through channels, providing an active feedback between the currents and the channel conductances. As these networked systems are strongly coupled via the flow — a local disturbance in the network will be “felt” in a broad neighborhood around the site — dynamical adaptation allows the networks to self-organize and exhibit rich behaviors that are sometimes counterintuitive.
In this talk, Eleni Katifori will explore some of this rich phenomenology and, among other questions, try to understand how tides shape river deltas, explain how loopiness emerges in leaf vasculature and calculate the price of having a pulse.
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About the Speaker
Katifori obtained her Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University, followed by a fellowship at the Center for Studies in Physics and Biology at Rockefeller University in New York. In 2012, she started a position as an independent group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Goettingen, and in 2015 she joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. Katifori is a recipient of a Burroughs Wellcome Career Award at the Scientific Interface, an NSF Career Award, the APS DSOFT Early Career Award and is a Simons Investigator in the Mathematical Modelling of Living Systems. Her research interests are primarily theoretical and span broad areas, such as soft matter physics with a focus on biologically inspired physics, biological transport networks and thin shell elasticity.