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

 

 

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 joined Prof. Schatz’ Pattern Formation and Control Lab in spring of 2014. Before joining Prof. Schatz lab, he worked at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the Fluid Metrology Group where he studied fluid measurement science. While at NIST, he maintained various liquid flow primary standards and he worked in the wind tunnel developing high fidelity anemometer calibration techniques for varying turbulence intensities. Now, in the Pattern Formation and Control Lab, Chris is searching for evidence of dynamically relevant, unstable solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations at the onset of turbulence in Taylor-Couette flow using fully time resolved tomographic particle image velocimetry (tomo PIV). These special solutions called, exact coherent structures play a key role in a fundamentally deterministic description of turbulence.

 

 

 

 

Logan Kageorge is a graduate student in the School of Physics.  He has a B.A. in Physics and Mathematics from Boston University, where he studied Nanophotonics with Bennett Goldberg.  He joined the Pattern Formation and Control Lab in the spring of 2016. Logan is taking over the quasi-2D turbulence experiment, exploring the role of exact coherent structures in the weakly turbulent regime and mapping the dynamical connections between them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brett Tregoning is a graduate student in the School of Physics.  He received his B.A. in physics from Vanderbilt University, where he studied condensed matter physics with Kalman Varga.  He joined the Pattern Formation and Control lab in the spring of 2017.  He runs the lab’s Rayleigh-Bénard Convection experiment.  His research is focused on the application of data-driven methods to spatio-temporally complex systems, like the method of topological pattern analysis known as persistent homology and predictive machine learning algorithms.

 

 

 

 

 

Undergraduate Students

 

Chayanon Wichitrnithed (Namo) is a second year student in the School of Physics with a minor in scientific computing. He is currently working on simulations of the checkerboard quasi-2D turbulence experiment with Logan, Brett, and Tyler. He is also working with Brett to apply machine learning to fluid dynamics systems.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tyler Campbell is pursuing his Bachelor’s degree from the School of Physics. He is working on an experimental realization of the quasi-2D checkerboard turbulence experiment with Logan, Brett, and Namo.

Michael Weaver is a junior in the School of Physics. He is investigating bifurcations in the Taylor-Couette geometry with Chris Crowley.

 

 

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

• Scott Douglas completed his Ph.D. with the Physics Education Research Group in 2018 and will begin working at the Weber School in Atlanta in the Fall.
• Bala Suri received his Ph.D. in 2017 for his work in Kolmogorov flow. Bala is now working as a postdoctoral fellow working with Björn Hof at the Austrian Institute of Science and Technology in Vienna.
• Jeff Tithof went to University of Rochester where he worked as a postdoc and then an Assistant Professor (Research) with Professor Doug Kelley. He is now faculty in Mechanical Engineering at University of Minnesota.
• Daniel Borrero went on to a be a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at Reed College. Daniel is now an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon.
• 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 then served as a 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.  In 2016, Jeff Global moved to IBM as a Research Leader and Distinguished Research Staff Member.

Undergraduate Students

• Grace Chambers received her BS in Physics from Georgia Tech in 2016 and is now a Ph.D. student in Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech.
• Jay Howell received his BS in Physics from Georgia Tech in 2016.
• James Mullenbach is a senior at Georgia Tech, planning to graduate in December. He is currently working in Prof. Borodovsky’s lab.
• 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)