People
Principal Investigator
Mike Schatz is a Professor and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology where he heads the Pattern Formation and Control Lab. He received his B.S. from the University of Notre Dame and did his Ph.D. and postdoctoral work in the Department of Physics at the University of Texas at Austin, where he worked in the laboratory of Prof. Harry Swinney. Mike's research focuses primarily on the interdisciplinary field of pattern formation, a major branch of nonlinear science. The goal of this research is to understand the fundamental concepts that describe how nonlinear processes can cause structure to emerge in a wide variety of systems as they are driven away from equilibrium, especially those of a fluid mechanical nature. Mike also heads the Georgia Tech Physics Education Research Group, where he works on curriculum reform with an emphasis on integrating modeling and scientific computation into all aspects (lecture, lab and homework) of introductory Physics courses. Mike was recently named a Fellow of the American Physical Society "for pioneering and creative experimental contributions to the characterization and control of complex fluid and pattern formation phenomena."
Graduate Students
Bala Suri graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology - Kharagpur with an Integrated Masters in Physics. When he first came to Tech, he joined the Georgia Tech Physics Education Research Group, where he worked on incorporating computational modeling into high-school and undergraduate Physics curricula. He then joined the Pattern Formation and Control Lab and has been working on understanding the transition to turbulence in Kolmogorov flow using the tools of dynamical systems. Bala has recently started using the Local Ensemble Transform Kálmán Filter to forecast the evolution of Rayleigh-Bénard convection.
Jeff Tithof is a graduate student in the School of Physics. He has a B.S. in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, TN, where he worked under Yuri Kamyshkov and Thomas Papenbrock. Jeff joined the Schatz Lab in Spring 2011 and has been studying bifurcations in electromagnetically-driven, quasi-2D flows in collaboration with the group of Roman Grigoriev. He is also trying to find evidence for the existence of exact coherent structures in this flow. Jeff has recently continued our work on characterizing patterns in Rayleigh-Bénard convection using computational homology.
Scott Douglas received his B.A. in Physics from Colgate University where worked on computational simulations of the Hodgkin-Huxley model of neural transmission. In 2009, he came to Georgia Tech, where he worked with Steve Harvey on computational structural biology and biophysics. Finding himself more engaged by the act of teaching biophysics rather than by biophysics itself, he joined the Georgia Tech Physics Education Research Group in 2011. He is currently working on developing materials and research plans for the Mike's Physics MOOC.
Emily Alicea-Munoz is a graduate student in the School of Physics. She has a B.S. in Physics from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez and an M.S. in Astronomy and Astrophysics from Penn State. She previously worked at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center studying cosmological black hole mergers. She joined the Georgia Tech Physics Education Research Group in 2012 with the goal of studying outreach methodologies within a physics education framework. Emily lives in Atlanta with her husband, John Wise (of the Georgia Tech Center for Relativistic Astrophysics) and their two cats, Sampson and Ditto.
Chris Crowley graduated with a B.S. degree in Physics from the University of Maryland in 2013. In spring of 2014 Chris joined Prof. Schatz Pattern Formation and Control Lab. Before joining Prof. Schatz lab, he worked at National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the Fluid Metrology Group under Michael R. Moldover where he studied fluid measurement science. In the Pattern Formation and Control Lab, Chris is serching for the evidence of exact coherent structures in the onset of turbulence in Taylor-Couette flow using tomographic PIV.
Research Staff
John Mark Aiken received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Physics from Georgia State University where he worked with Prof. Brian Thoms. While at GSU, John studied the effects of the SCALE-UP style classroom using a traditional algebra based curriculum. In collaboration with the Georgia Tech Physics Education Research Group and the Westminster Schools, John worked on extending Arizona State's Modeling Instruction curriculum to include computational modeling. Since 2013, John has been studying student performance and involvement in Mike's massive open online course in introductory physics.
Graduate Student Emeritus
Daniel Borrero went on to Reed College in Portland, OR where he has an appointment as a visiting professor of Physics. He has an M.S. and PhD in Physics from Georgia Tech and a B.S. in Physics from the University of Texas at Austin, where he worked in the lab of Dan Heinzen. At Tech, Daniel studied the lifetimes of decaying turbulence in linearly stable Taylor-Couette flow. He used tomographic PIV to search for evidence of exact coherent structures in this transitional regime. Daniel has also studied synchronization in coupled nonlinear oscillators in collaboration with Prof. Kurt Wiesenfeld and symmetry reduction schemes applicable to high-dimensional flows with Prof. Predrag Cvitanović.
Alumni
Postdocs
Shih-Yin Lin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at National Changhua University of Education.
Sam Raben went on to work for the FDA as a grant reviewer.
Matt Kohlmyer went on to be a Teaching Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University (NC State). In 2010, he left NC State to work at WebAssign, Inc. in Raleigh, NC.
Nicolas Garnier is a Research Scientist in the Laboratoire de Physique at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (ENSL) and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Lyon, France.
Graduate Students
Daniel Borrero is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at Reed College.
Adam Perkins is a Process Engineer in the Portland Technology Development group at Intel, where he works on developing next generation processor technologies.
Marcos "Danny" Caballero co-founded the Georgia Tech Physics Education Research Group. After postdoctoral work in the Physics Education Research Group at the University of Colorado - Boulder with Steve Pollock, Danny joined the faculty of the Physics and Astronomy Department at Michigan State University in fall of 2013.
Hüseyin Kurtuldu worked as a postdoc with Jerry Gollub at Haverford College before becoming a Research Engineer at SEMATECH. NY. Hüseyin is now Chief Technology Officer at AIV Labs in Ankara, Turkey.
Vivek Sharma received his Ph.D. in Polymer Science and Engineering from Georgia Tech. Following a postdoctoral appointment at the Hatsopoulos Microfluids Laboratory at MIT, Vivek joined the faculty of the University of Illinois - Chicago where he is now Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering.
Kapil Krishan is a Research Scientist for Procter & Gamble in Singapore.
Denis Semwogerere was a postdoc for Eric Weeks at Emory University and is now Senior Data Analyst at Rogers Communications in Toronto, Canada.
Jeff Rogers went on to work for HRL Laboratories in Malibu, CA and was a visiting faculty member at Caltech. He now serves as Program Manager in the Microsystems Technology Office at DARPA. In 2014, he left DARPA to become the Director of Engineering at Google in Mountain View, CA.
Undergraduate Students
Michael Toth completed his B.S.E. in Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and is now pursuing his Ph.D. in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.
Jon Paprocki received dual degrees in Applied Mathematics and Physics from Georgia Tech. After a brief stint at UCLA, returned to Georgia Tech where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in Mathematics.
Alan "A.J." Pryor received his B.S. in Physics from Georgia Tech and went on to pursue a Ph.D. in Astroparticle Physics at UCLA.
Marissa Wronka, Georgia Tech School of Physics
Chris Rodesney got a B.S. in Physics from Georgia Tech and is now in the Ph.D. program in Physics at the University of Texas at Austin.
Reuven Ballaban completed his B.S. in Physics at Georgia Tech, got an M.S. in Applied Physics from the University of Oregon and is now a Process Engineer at nLight.
James Owen Andrews, Georgia Tech School of Physics
Hyohyeon Jeong, Georgia Tech School of Computer Science
Ian Usie, Georgia Tech School of Physics
Callie Reis, Georgia Tech George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering
Patrick Poole, Georgia Tech School of Physics
Gerardo Viza, Georgia Tech School of Physics
Christopher Simmons, Woodward Academy High School Senior
Jennifer Rieser got her M.S. in Physics from Cornell University. She is now working on her Ph.D. with Doug Durian and Jerry Gollub at the University of Pennsylvania where she is studying mechanical failure in disordered materials.
Anne Balter, Oglethorpe University
Asha Nurse, Spelman College
Natalie Darnell, Spelman College
Shari Rifkin, Georgia Tech (REU student)
William Horowitz, Georgia Tech
C. Harrison Caudill, Georgia Tech
Will Ray, Rice University (REU student). Will is now has a Joint Professor appointment in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Tennessee - Knoxville and Oak Ridge National Lab.
Matthew Bennett, Georgia Tech, is now Assistant Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Rice University.
Todd Meyrath, Georgia Tech
Conor McKenna, Georgia Tech
David Hendrix, Georgia Tech
Mary Miller, Georgia Tech
Luis Burgos, Georgia Tech
Ben Buhrow, University of Northern Iowa (REU student)
David Howell, Bucknell University (REU student)
Wook Hwang, Caltech
Kirk Elder, Georgia Tech (REU student)
Davienne Monbleau, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (REU student)
© 2013 Schatz Pattern Formation and Control Lab | Last updated: 5-23-2014