Member Labs

Everything flows. From water and air to ice to grains to rock, flow creates the complex structures and landscapes in which we live. The Penn Complex Fluids Lab sits at the intersection of fluid dynamics, soft & living matter, and environmental science. We seek to develop fundamental understanding of the physical/chemical properties that govern the structure and behavior of naturally occurring complex fluids. By advancing this understanding, we seek to inspire the design of sustainable materials with unique properties.

The Scalable Autonomous Robots (ScalAR) Lab investigates fundamental robotics challenges at the nexus of nonlinear dynamics, uncertainty, and autonomous systems. They develop distributed unmanned platforms for long-term operation in dynamic environments, emphasizing adaptive sampling, heterogeneous swarm coordination, dynamics-driven planning, invariant feature estimation, and emergent pattern analysis.

The Penn Soft Earth Dynamics (PennSED) Lab investigates the mechanics and patterns of earth materials and fluid–sediment interfaces through laboratory experiments, fieldwork, and theory. Their work spans sediment transport, rheology, landform dynamics (dunes, rivers, deltas), stochastic transport processes, and landscape responses to climate.

The Mathijssen lab is interested in exploring the physics of life: we combine experimental and theoretical techniques across the disciplines of physics and biology.

Our main goals are to unravel the physics of pathogens, to design biomedical materials, and understand the collective functionality of living systems (out of equilibrium). To solve these multi-scale problems we use methods from microbiology, fluid mechanics, omics, statistical physics, microscopy and information theory. Recent themes include hydrodynamic communication, pathogen clearance in the airways, tuning upstream swimming of microrobots, and bacterial contamination dynamics.

These questions are both fundamental in nature (e.g. How can an intelligent system arise from the collective dynamics of its basic components?) and directly applied to our society (e.g. What is the probability of SARS-CoV-2 transmission within a food supply chain?). Our enthusiasm for research is driven by curiosity and the need for solutions that connect science with the challenges of the world we live in. Besides research, we like organising community events, lab visits and science hikes. 

The McBride Lab integrates interfacial science, fluid physics, and soft matter to engineer solutions in water, energy, and sustainability. Through microfluidics and nano/microscale devices, they study transport and phase change phenomena, informing materials design for desalination, resource recovery, waste remediation, and energy–water nexus challenges.

Coming soon!

The Park Lab is a Computational Fluids Group that develops predictive, cost-effective computational frameworks for multi-physics fluid dynamics, addressing high-Reynolds-number turbulence, compressibility, heat transfer, complex geometries, and fluid–structure interaction. By simulating real-world scale problems, they uncover fundamental mechanisms of momentum and heat transfer from first principles to inform engineering design.

Penn GEFLOW advances a predictive, physics-based understanding of natural fluid flows and their links to aquatic ecosystems. We connect boundary-scale processes at interfaces to the large-scale behavior of Earth’s surface and subsurface waters by combining fluid dynamics, high-performance simulations, laboratory experiments, and field observations. Our goal is to build governing models that are both scientifically fundamental and societally relevant—a home for those driven to bridge theory and the real world.

The AWARE Lab explores environmental flows and their interactions with engineering systems. The team applies lab- and field-scale experiments, theory, and modeling to real-world challenges in atmospheric turbulence, renewable energy, and aerodynamics in complex flow conditions. They also develop scalable sensing solutions for local climate dynamics, spanning centimeters to kilometers.

The ATMOS Lab studies how turbulent processes at the Earth’s surface interact with the atmosphere across scales, from microclimates to regional weather and climate. Using a combination of theory, high-resolution numerical simulations, and observations, we aim to improve the physical understanding and modeling of land–atmosphere interactions in natural and urban environments.