News updates, tidbits, awards & recognitions


  • February 2024 Akash Mattupalli receives a H. William Bottomley Research Scholarship from the School of Mechanical Engineering for Spring 2024, recognizing his research contributions to the TMNT-Lab. Congratulations!
  • January 2024 SURF 2023 alum Luke Sanders recognized as 2024 Engineering Technology Student of the Year by the Georgia Society of Professional Engineers. Congratulations!
  • January 2024 TMNT-Lab PI recognized amongst 140 (out of 494) "Outstanding Engineering Teachers, Fall 2023" by Purdue's College of Engineering for his contributions to ME509 (Intermediate Fluid Mechanics).
  • January 2024 Pranay Nagrani recognized with a Bilsland Dissertation Fellowship from Purdue University. Congratulations!
  • January 2024 Uday Rade joins the group to work towards his PhD in Mechanical Engineering. Welcome!
  • November 2023 Members of the TMNT-Lab present talks at the 76th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics.
  • November 2023 Pranay is awarded the 2023 R. H. Kohr Graduate Student Fellowship from the School of Mechanical Engineering. Congratulations, Pranay!
  • October 2023 Nishanth Surianarayanan joins the group to work towards her PhD in Mechanical Engineering. Welcome!
  • October 2023 Pranay's paper "Data-driven rheological characterization of stress buildup and relaxation in thermal greases" was selected as a "Featured Article" by the Journal of Rheology. Congratulations! Learn more about this research here.
  • October 2023 Ziyu Wang joins the group to work towards her PhD in Mechanical Engineering. Welcome!
  • October 2023 TMNT-Lab PI co-organizes, with Profs. James Gilchrist (Lehigh) and Pradeep Sharma (Houston), the Taylor Medal Symposium at the 2023 Society of Engineering Science Annual Technical Meeting in honor of the medalist, Prof. Julio M. Ottino, who is the TMNT-Lab PI's PhD co-advisor.
  • July 2023 Jalen Magee and Luke Sanders present posters at the 2023 Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium.
  • July 2023 Zongxin Yu defends her PhD dissertation. Congratulations, Dr. Yu!
  • June 2023 Pranay's work is selected and showcased in the 2023 SHINE: SHowcasing Images in Nature & Engineering exhibit running June 26–Aug. 4, 2023 at the Robert L. Ringel Gallery in Purdue's Stewart Center. Congratulations!
  • June 2023 NSF Grant CMMI-2245343 "CDS&E: Multiscale Computational Modeling of Flow-Induced Mechanical Deformation via Nonlocal Formulations" awarded to the TMNT-Lab PI to support research in the group.
  • June 2023 Pranay wins the Avram Bar-Cohen Best Paper Award and receives a Best Poster Award in the "Mechanics & Reliability" track for his contribution to ITherm2023. Congratulations!
  • May 2023 Jalen Magee and Luke Sanders (Savannah State University) join the TMNT-Lab for the 10-week SURF 2023 summer program. Welcome!
  • May 2023 TMNT-Lab PI co-organizes, with Dr. Amin Rahman from the University of Washington, the minisymposium on The Mathematics of Time Writ Large: In Memoriam the Work of Denis L. Blackmore (Part I, Part II) at the SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems (DS23).
  • May 2023 Zongxin Yu's new paper on delayed Hopf bifurcations and control of ferrofluid interfaces is highlighted by Physical Review E on Twitter. Congratulations!
  • May 2023 The TMNT-Lab moves to FLEX Lab.
  • April 2023 Shrihari Pande defends his MS thesis. Congratulations! Shrihari continues his PhD studies at Purdue, in the TMNT-Lab.
  • November 2022 Members of the TMNT-Lab present talks at the 75th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics.
  • July 2022 Xiaojia Wang defends her PhD dissertation. Congratulations, Dr. Wang!
  • June 2022 Tanmay Shidhore defends his PhD dissertation. Congratulations, Dr. Shidhore!
  • June 2022 Dr. Evgeniy Boyko accepts offer to start a position as tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Technion — Israel Institute of Technology. Congratulations, Prof. Boyko!
  • May 2022 TMNT-Lab PI honored with a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award (Cyprus: All Disciplines, Academic Year 2022–2023). Per the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, this award "is a reflection of [Dr. Christov’s] leadership and contributions to society. ... The Fulbright Program is devoted to increasing mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. Fulbright is the world’s largest and most diverse international educational exchange program. Fulbright alumni ... include 61 Nobel Laureates, 89 Pulitzer Prize winners, 76 MacArthur Fellows, and thousands of leaders across the private, public and non-profit sectors."
  • April 2022 TMNT-Lab PI receives the Graduate Teaching Award from the School of Mechanical Engineering, in recognition for excellence in graduate classroom instruction, upon nomination from students in ME 69700 – Nonlinear Wave Mechanics (Spring 2021). Many thanks for their support!!!
  • April 2022 TMNT-Lab PI promoted to Associate Professor (with tenure), effective with the 2022-23 academic year. It would not have been possible without the dedicated efforts of the TMNT-Lab members over the last six years. Many thanks to them!!!
  • March 2022 TMNT-Lab PI participates in the local organizing committee of the 75th Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics. Join us in Indianapolis this Fall (November 20–22, 2022) for the meeting!
  • March 2022 TMNT-Lab PI and Dr. Evgeniy Boyko are co-organizing a Focus Session at the APS March Meeting 2022 on Microscale Non-Newtonian and Complex Flows.
  • December 2021 Zongxin Yu recognized with a Bilsland Dissertation Fellowship from Purdue University. Congratulations!
  • November 2021 The invited topical review on the nascent subject of soft hydraulics by the TMNT-Lab PI has been published in the Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter. The review summarizes, amongst many contributions from the community, our key accomplishments at the TMNT-Lab towards deriving the basic laws of flows of complex ("non-Newtonian") fluids through tiny deformable pipes.
  • November 2021 Members of the TMNT-Lab present talks at the 74th Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics.
  • November 2021 Daihui Lu defends her PhD dissertation. Congratulations, Dr. Lu!
  • October 2021 Check out the Purdue ME News article about our new project on fluid–structure interactions in patient-specific models of cerebral aneurysms, which was recently funded by the Brain Aneurysm Foundation.
  • October 2021 Xiaojia Wang is selected to participate in the Rising Stars in MechE 2021 workshop hosted by MIT. Congratulations!
  • October 2021 Dr. Evgeniy Boyko joins the group as a Lillian Gilbreth Postdoctoral Fellow after spending a year at Princeton University as a Rothschild/Zuckerman fellow. Dr. Boyko will also be a joint member of Prof. Basaran's group in the Davidson School of Chemical Engineering. Welcome!
  • October 2021 Pranay Nagrani defends his MS thesis. Congratulations! Pranay continues his PhD studies at Purdue ME, in collaboration with the MTEC Lab.
  • September 2021 Xiaojia's paper "Reduced models of unidirectional flows in compliant rectangular ducts at finite Reynolds number" was selected as a "Featured Article" in the special issue "Tribute to Frank M. White on his 88th Anniversary" of Physics of Fluids. Congratulations!
  • September 2021 TMNT-Lab PI and co-investigator Dr. Marconnet have their proposal "Validation of a CFD Model for Gas-Liquid Flows in Packed Bed Reactors to Enable Thermo-Fluid Analysis in Microgravity" selected by NASA for funding under the research announcement "Use of the NASA Physical Sciences Informatics System – Appendix G" to support joint research between the TMNT and MTEC labs.
  • September 2021 TMNT-Lab PI and co-investigator Dr. Rayz (from the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering) receive a Research Grant Award from the Brain Aneurysm Foundation towards their work on patient-specific computational modeling of hemodynamics and biomechanics of intracranial aneurysms, to support joint research between the TMNT and CFML labs.
  • August 2021 TMNT-Lab PI recognized amongst 97 (out of 452) "Outstanding Engineering Teachers, Spring 2021" by Purdue's College of Engineering for his contributions to ME697 (new graduate course on Nonlinear Wave Mechanics).
  • August 2021 Shrihari Pande joins the group to work towards his MSME thesis. Welcome!
  • July 2021 The TMNT-Lab participates in the SPARC Workshop on Fluidics involving deformable interfaces, feel free to join this free-to-register workshop to learn about research on soft hydraulics.
  • June 2021 Preprint of an invited topical review on the nascent subject soft hydraulics is posted. The review summarizes, amongst many contributions from the community, our key accomplishments at the TMNT-Lab towards deriving the basic laws of flows through tiny elastic pipes.
  • May 2021 William Alston and Jaden Bryant (Savannah State University) join the TMNT-Lab for the 10-week NCN URE 2021 summer program. Welcome!
  • June 2021 Pranay receives a Best Poster Award under the "Emerging Technologies & Fundamentals" for his contribution to ITherm2021. Congratulations!
  • March 2021 TMNT-Lab PI recognized by Purdue's College of Engineering as 2021 Outstanding Faculty Mentor of Mechanical Engineering Graduate Students, upon nomination of the TMNT-Lab members. Many thanks for their support!!!
  • March 2021 TMNT-Lab PI and Prof. Pejman Sanaei (New York Institute of Technology) are co-organizing a Focus Session at the APS March Meeting 2021 on Microflows Meet Soft Matter. Also check out Zongxin's talk at the meeting!
  • March 2021 Vishal's paper below was highlighted by a Purdue News service interview and story.
  • February 2021 TMNT-Lab Alum Dr. Vishal Anand's paper in Z. Angew. Math. Mech. (ZAMM) (the journal founded by von Mises, in which Prandtl's boundary layer theory was first published) was selected as Editor's Choice article for vol. 101 iss. 2. Editor's Choice is a category "to highlight articles which are identified by the Editor-in-Chief as particularly valuable or interesting", and making the paper free to read. Congratulations!
  • January 2021 Check out the Purdue ME News article about our work on developing open-source computational tools for two-fluid modeling of dense particulate suspensions.
  • January 2021 TMNT-Lab PI recognized amongst 107 (out of 452) "Outstanding Engineering Teachers, Fall 2020" by Purdue's College of Engineering for his contributions to ME509 (Intermediate Fluid Mechanics).
  • November 2020 Members of the TMNT-Lab present talks at the (virtual) 73rd Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics, including co-organizing a Focus Session on Understanding Thermal Transport in Flows of Dense Suspensions with Prof. Amy Marconnet (Purdue).
  • September 2020 TMNT-Lab PI presents a talk at the inaugural Frontiers in Mechanical Engineering and Sciences Multi-University webinar.
  • September 2020 Daihui Lu presents a talk at the InterPore2020 virtual conference.
  • August 2020 Dr. Kimberley Stevens Boster finishes her Lillian Gilbreth Postdoctoral Fellowship at Purdue and moves to the University of Rochester to work on cerebrospinal fluid dynamics as a postdoc. Wishing her continued success!
  • August 2020 NSF Grant CMMI-2029540 "Nonlinear Dynamics of Confined Interfaces: Beyond Linear Analysis and Towards Control" awarded to the TMNT-Lab PI to support research in the group.
  • June 2020 Check out the TMNT-Lab PI in the group photo (#87) in the Introduction to the Stokes at 200 theme issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A (reporting on the G. G. Stokes bicentenial event held at Pembroke College, Cambridge in Fall 2019). See also the TMNT-Lab research poster presented at the meeting.
  • May 2020 The TMNT-Lab's cancelled APS March Meeting talk was recorded as part of the 2020 virtual mufmech. You can watch all the talks here.
  • May 2020 Vishal Anand defends his PhD dissertation. Congratulations, Dr. Anand!
  • April 2020 TMNT-Lab PI receives Outstanding Reviewer recognition (out of 52) from the journal Physica Scripta, for the quality, quantity and timeliness of his reviews in calendar year 2019.
  • March 2020 TMNT-Lab PI recognized as part of the 2020 class of Outstanding Referees (147 selected out of approximately 71,000, and only the 5th Purdue University faculty to be recognized this way) by the American Physical Society (APS) for contributions to assessing manuscripts for publication in the APS journals (the Physical Review).
  • March 2020 TMNT-Lab PI and Prof. Pejman Sanaei (then at New York Institute of Technology) are co-organizing a Focus Session at the APS March Meeting 2020 on Microflows Meet Soft Matter (Part I, Part II).
  • November 2019 Members of the TMNT-Lab present talks at the 72nd Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics.
  • August 2019 TMNT-Lab PI recognized amongst 119 (out of 452) "Outstanding Engineering Teachers from Spring 2019" by Purdue's College of Engineering for his contributions to ME610 (graduate Boundary Layer Theory).
  • August 2019 Zongxin Yu joins the group to work towards her PhD in Mechanical Engineering. Welcome!
  • August 2019 Jielin Yang joins the group to work towards his PhD in Mathematics, co-advised with Prof. Steve Dong. Welcome!
  • August 2019 Pranay Nagrani returns to Purdue as an MS student in the School of Mechanical Engineering. He will continue his work on numerical simulation of suspension flows and will also perform experiments on heat transfer in suspensions, in collaboration with the Marconnet Thermal and Energy Conversion Lab. Welcome back!
  • August 2019 Ruihuan Cai (Zhejiang University) joins the TMNT-Lab for 12 months under a China Scholarship Council (CSC) Scholarship to study diffusion mechanisms of granular matter. Welcome!
  • July 2019 Masashi and Valeria present posters at the 2019 SURF Research Symposium.
  • June 2019 Ahmad Faraz Badar (Zakir Husain College of Engineering, AMU) joins the TMNT-Lab for 10 weeks under the S. N. Bose Scholars Program 2019 exchange. Welcome!
  • June 2019 Recent work of the TMNT-Lab and collaborators, on topological defects (domain walls) with long-range interactions, was featured in the Physical Review's Kaleidoscope visual gallery. Enjoy!
  • May 2019 Masashi Nishiguchi (The University of Mount Union) and Valeria Tellez (Texas A&M University–Kingsville) join the TMNT-Lab for the 12-week SURF 2019 summer program. Welcome!
  • May 2019 Sanjan Muchandimath (IIT-Madras) joins the TMNT-Lab for the 9-week PURE 2019 summer program. Welcome!
  • May 2019 TMNT-Lab PI organizes the minisymposium on Modeling and Simulation of Fluid--Structure Interactions of Internal Flows in Soft Conduits at the 2019 SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems.
  • May 2019 Kim's poster at the Advancing Health: An Engineering – Medicine Partnership wins a prize for being top-rated in the "Brain and Health Function" category. Congratulations!
  • April 2019 Members of the TMNT-Lab attend and present talks the 2019 Midwestern University Fluid Mechanics Retreat (MUFMECH).
  • April 2019 Aditya Ghodgaonkar defends his MS thesis. Congratulations! Aditya continues his PhD studies at MIT.
  • March 2019 A proposal on "Micro- and nano-scale flows through deformable confinements" has been funded under the Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration (SPARC) of the Government of India to establish a collaboration between Purdue University and IIT Kharagpur.
  • December 2018 Dr. Kimberley Stevens joins the group as a Lillian Gilbreth Postdoctoral Fellow after defending her PhD thesis at Brigham Young University (BYU). Dr. Stevens will also be a joint member of Prof. Rayz's Cardiovascular Flow Modeling Laboratory in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering. Welcome!
  • December 2018 Dr. Federico Municchi finishes his postdoctoral appointment at Purdue and moves to the University of Nottingham to work on porous media flows as a research fellow. Wishing him continued success!
  • November 2018 Zihao Lin receives a H. William Bottomley Research Scholarship from the School of Mechanical Engineering for Spring 2019, recognizing his research contributions to the TMNT-Lab. Congratulations!
  • November 2018 Members of the TMNT-Lab present talks at the 71st Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics, including organizing the Focus Session on The Physics of Microscale Fluid Structure Interactions: Fully Coupled Flow and Deformation Mechanics (Part I, Part II).
  • October 2018 Special Issue of the journal Mechanics Research Communications on "Mechanics from the 20th to the 21st Century: The Legacy of Gérard A. Maugin," co-guest edited by the TMNT-Lab PI, is published.
  • September 2018 Julia receives a Purdue Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR) Scholarship for 2018-2019, recognizing her engagement in research, scholarship, or creative work in the TMNT-Lab. Congratulations!
  • August 2018 TMNT-Lab PI recognized amongst 97 (out of 452) "Outstanding Engineering Teachers from Spring '18" by Purdue's College of Engineering for his contributions to ME309 (undergraduate Fluid Mechanics).
  • August 2018 TMNT-Lab PI will discuss the TMNT-Lab's research on fluid--structure interactions at the University of Nebraska--Lincoln's Department of Mathematics Colloquium.
  • August 2019 Xiaojia Wang joins the group to work towards her PhD in Mechanical Engineering. Welcome!
  • July 2018 Zoë Penko and Zihao Lin present posters at the 2018 SURF Research Symposium.
  • July 2018 Aditya and the Purdue team of interns receive the "The Good Doctor Steve Weber Engineering Excellence Award" for their work at Sun Hydraulics this summer. Congratulations!
  • June 2018 Members of the TMNT-Lab present talks at the 18th U.S. National Congress for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics.
  • May 2018 Zihao Lin (Purdue) and Zoë Penko (University of Alabama at Birmingham) join the TMNT-Lab for the 12-week SURF 2018 summer program. Welcome!
  • May 2018 Joshua David John Rathinaraj (IIT-Madras) joins the TMNT-Lab for the 9-week PURE 2018 summer program. Welcome!
  • May 2018 Pranay Nagrani (NIT-Karnataka, Surathkal) joins the TMNT-Lab for 10-weeks under the S. N. Bose Scholars Program 2018 exchange. Welcome!
  • April 2018 Tanmay Inamdar defends his MS thesis. Congratulations!
  • April 2018 Mengying Wang defends her MS thesis. Congratulations! Mengying continues her PhD studies at Northwestern.
  • December 2017 Dr. Federico Municchi joins the group as a postdoc after defending his PhD thesis at TU Graz. Welcome!
  • November 2017 Tanmay Shidhore defends his MS thesis. Congratulations!
  • November 2017 Members of the TMNT-Lab present talks at the 70th Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics.
  • November 2017 Members of the TMNT-Lab present talks at the 2017 APS Prairie Section Fall Meeting.
  • October 2017 Aditya Ghodgaonkar joins the group to work toward his MSME thesis. Welcome!
  • August 2017 Vishal Anand joins the group to work towards his PhD in Mechanical Engineering. Welcome!
  • July 2017 NSF Grant CBET-1705637 "Microscale Fluid--Structure Interactions: Towards a Predictive Theory of Their Dynamic Response" awarded to the TMNT-Lab PI to support research in the group.
  • June 2017 Julia Meyer (Purdue) joins the TMNT-Lab for the 12-week SURF 2017 summer program. Welcome!
  • June 2017 Special Issue of the journal Wave Motion on "Mathematical modeling and physical dynamics of solitary waves: From continuum mechanics to field theory," co-guest edited by the TMNT-Lab PI, is published.
  • May 2017 Sanketh Saravanan (IIT-Madras) joins the TMNT-Lab for the 8-week PURE 2017 summer program. Welcome!
  • February 2017 Members of the TMNT-Lab present talks at the 2017 SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering.
  • December 2016 Mengying Wang joins the group to work toward her MSME thesis. Welcome!
  • November 2016 Members of the TMNT-Lab present talks at the 69th Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics.
  • October 2016 ACS PRF grant 57371-DNI9 "Controlling Particle Migration Using Geometry and Hydrodynamics" awarded to the TMNT-Lab to support research in the group.
  • September 2016 Theme Issue of the storied Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London on "Energy and the subsurface," co-guest edited by the TMNT-Lab PI, is published.
  • September 2016 Tanmay Inamdar joins the group to work toward his MSME thesis. Welcome!
  • August 2016 Daihui Lu joins the group to work towards her PhD in Mechanical Engineering. Welcome!
  • March 2016 Tanmay Shidhore joins the group to work toward his MSME thesis. Welcome!
  • January 2016 TMNT-Lab @ Purdue is founded. Off we go!