USA Africa Dialogue Series - STAR AWARD: Nigerian John Dabiri, 2010 MacArthur Fellow wins $500,00 for 5 years

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2audOlniaQ&feature=player_embedded

John Dabiri, 2010 MacArthur Fellow

Dabiri enhances our understanding of evolutionary adaptation and issues of fluid dynamics, such as blood flow to the heart, by studying the hydrodynamics of jellyfish propulsion.
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Caltech engineer named 2010 MacArthur fellow

Posted: 09/28/2010 11:09:38 AM PDT

A Caltech biophysicist was among 23 recipients of this year's MacArthur fellowships, announced Tuesday.

John O. Dabiri, whose studies of schooling fish have inspired new ideas for wind farming, and whose current investigations focus on hydrodynamics behind jellyfish propulsion, heads Caltech's Biological Propulsion Laboratory.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation awards the $500,000, "no strings attached" grants (also known as "genius" grants) to individuals who show "exceptional creativity in their work and the prospect for still more in the future," according to the foundation's website.

Dabiri earned his bachelor's degree from Princeton University, a Master of Science in aeronautics and a PhD in bioengineering from Caltech. He joined the Caltech faculty in 2005.

Among Dabiri's distinctions are an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator award for research in bio-inspired propulsion and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. He was also one of Popular Science magazine's "Brilliant 10" young scientists to watch in 2008.

This year's crop of fellows also includes a theater director, an anthropologist, a quantum astrophysicist, a sign-language linguist, a computer security specialist and an installation artist.

Read more: http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/news/ci_16195130#ixzz10rJnbblR

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http://pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/CaltechNews/articles/v41/jellies.html

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Before he met Gharib, Dabiri's primary influences were his parents, who had left their native Nigeria in 1975 to settle in Toledo, Ohio. Dabiri's dad, a mechanical engineer, got a job teaching math at a community college. His mom, a computer scientist, raised three children and then started a software development company. His dad would occasionally do engineering work on the side, using a drafting table he had set up in the living room. "That's how I fell in love with engineering—watching him," says his son.

Educated at a small Baptist high school, where he graduated first in his class in 1997, Dabiri was accepted by Princeton, the only university he had applied to. After struggling a bit with his classwork that first semester, he brought up his grades and spent two summers on the campus doing research that included work on helicopter design. Having grown up in the Rust Belt, home to many auto plants, Dabiri naturally gravitated toward transportation engineering. But he changed gears after his SURF at Caltech, and, after returning to Princeton for his senior year, he applied to the Institute to start graduate work with Gharib's group. At Caltech, he focused much of his doctoral research on how swirling motions, or vortices, are created by rigid plates compared with flexible plates. "Some questions were biological in nature and some were more pure fluid dynamics," he says.

UNQUOTE

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http://fwix.com/la/share/f535138041/30-year-old_black_caltech_prof_wins_macarthur_genius_grant

John Dabiri is a biophysicist whose work draws on a wide range of fields—including theoretical fluid dynamics, evolutionary biology, and biomechanics—to unravel the secrets of one of the earliest means of animal locomotion. He studies some of the simplest multicellular organisms, jellyfish (medusae), which propel themselves by contracting cells in their bell-shaped outer skin and generating jet forces in the tail end, with tentacles trailing behind. From a theoretical engineering perspective, he has shown that elucidating the mechanisms of locomotion depends on detailed mathematical analysis of the fluid vortex rings that jellyfish form in the surrounding water by contracting their bell; his results significantly increase our knowledge of the impact of size and speed on the formation of optimal vortex rings. Because the relative impact of viscosity on propulsion decreases with greater size, fluid dynamics theory implies that rowing becomes a more efficient means of locomotion as animals grow larger. Dabiri and colleagues confirmed this experimentally by examining propulsion during maturation and in adult specimens of varying size across hundreds of species, and they also found that a hybrid jet-paddling motion brings the advantage of drawing nearby prey into the bell, where the tentacles can capture them. Dabiri has invented a method that allows divers to use tiny reflective particles to visualize, with high speed and fine spatial resolution, the fluid dynamics of propulsion by jellyfish in their native habitats; this technique provides a wealth of new data that can be used to test and refine models of vortex behavior. Dabiri's research has profound implications not only for understanding the evolution and biophysics of locomotion in jellyfish and other aquatic animals, but also for a host of distantly related questions and applications in fluid dynamics, from blood flow in the human heart to the design of wind power generators.

John Dabiri received a B.S.E. (2001) from Princeton University and an M.S. (2003) and Ph.D. (2005) from the California Institute of Technology, where he is currently an associate professor of aeronautics and bioengineering. His scientific articles have appeared in such journals as Nature, the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, the Journal of Experimental Biology, and PNAS.

Professor John O. Dabiri

Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Bioengineering
B.S.E., Princeton University, 2001
M.S., California Institute of Technology, 2003
Ph.D., California Institute of Technology, 2005


Biography

John Dabiri is an Assistant Professor in the Graduate Aeronautical Laboratories and the Option of Bioengineering at Caltech.  He graduated from Princeton University with a B.S.E. degree summa cumlaude in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in June 2001.  In September 2001, he came to Caltech as a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellow, Betty and Gordon Moore Fellow, and Y.C. Fung Fellow in Bioengineering. Under the supervision of Professor Morteza Gharib, he earned an M.S. degree in Aeronautics in June 2003, followed by a Ph.D. in Bioengineering with a minor in Aeronautics in April 2005. He joined the Caltech faculty in May 2005. In 2008, he was selected as an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator for research in bio-inspired propulsion, and Popular Science magazine named him one of its "Brilliant 10" scientists.


Expertise

Mechanics and dynamics of biological propulsion, fluid dynamic energy conversion
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