Theoretical and Computational Mechanics
On Shun Pak, Mechanical Engineering
Dr. On Shun Pak's research focuses on the fluid mechanics of biological and artificial microscopic swimmers. Locomotion of swimming microorganisms such as sperm cells and bacteria plays important roles in different biological processes, including reproduction and bacterial infection. Computational tools are used to better understand the physical mechanisms underlying their swimming motion (panel A and B). In addition, engineering principles and machine learning techniques are applied to design artificial microscopic swimmers (panel C) for potential biomedical applications such as drug delivery and microsurgery.
The biological images in panels A and B are adopted, respectively, from Pedley, IMA J. Appl. Math., 81:488–521 (2016) and Chen et al., eLife, 6:e22140 (2017).