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STUDENT PROFILES

Marcus Roper

Area

Applied Mechanics

Focus

Roper, who studies microfluidics, has received a fellowship from the Kodak Fellows Program. The fellowships are given each year to one of the top graduate students, as designated by the host program, at a few of the best schools across the country.




The presence of my advisors (Howard Stone and Michael Brenner) and the proximity to so many imaginative experimentalists is what drove me to Harvard. Both my advisors are known for studying hard, sometimes unconventional, but most definitely exciting problems.

I'm trying to develop a model to describe an experiment being performed at ESPCI (in Paris). This is very cool. They have built a controllable micron-scale swimmer. If we could produce a quantitatively accurate theory for how fast it swims, then we may be able to calculate the bending stiffness of the various components. Suddenly it becomes possible to ask questions about the chemistry of the contacts between the parts of the swimmer. I'm also studying shapes that minimize drag. If you are optimizing for a low flow speed, it turns out that the best shape is really very symmetrical, but at high speed it is highly asymmetric. At the moment, I can hardly sleep for wondering whether the asymmetry might come on at a finite flow speed. No one knows.

There are very few places in the world where one can spend the morning thinking about some phenomenon seen in a microfluidic device and the afternoon thinking about how fish swim or why microorganisms are shaped in the way that they are.