Gazzola uses simulation, experiment to analyze locomotion of swimmers

 

Mattia Gazzola, a new assistant professor in MechSE, is used to change. Gazzola, who started here in August, has lived in five countries and seven cities before his most recent relocation to Urbana-Champaign. 

 

Despite all of his geographical transitions, one thing that’s never changed is his passion for mechanical engineering. 

 

Gazzola was born and raised in a small town outside of Milan, Italy, where he also attended college at Polytechnic University of Milan. He received his bachelor’s degree in 2003 in energy engineering and his master’s degree in 2006 in nuclear engineering. Gazzola then worked as a software architect in Barcelona, Spain, before moving to Zurich, Switzerland, where he earned a PhD in mechanical engineering from ETH Zurich in 2013. That year, he moved to the U.S. for a postdoctoral position at Harvard University, and continued his research there until this year, when he accepted the position in MechSE. 

 

Throughout his studies, he worked on research that included geometric reconstructions of vessels from MRI images, software development, and large-scale simulation in computational biology. His primary interest now lies in inverse design, which focuses on finding and calculating the best design solutions to achieve certain functions. 

 

“I started to apply this to fluids problems, and so I thought a good place to start would be locomotion,” said Gazzola. “I wanted to start understanding why a swimmer is shaped or moves a certain way.” 

 

A swimmer, as he defined it, is anything that propels in a flow by displacing the fluid around it. Particularly, Gazzola has focused on small-bodied swimmers such as small fish, and how they flex their bodies and move their tails to achieve propulsion. He then maps these calculations on large computing architectures in the form of numerical simulations, which he animates in colorful, lifelike graphics of swimmers. He has furthered his investigations by studying their collective behaviors to understand how flow and social interactions affect each other within groups of fish. 

 

Gazzola, who is also a Blue Waters Assistant Professor at NCSA, is one of just a few scientists who study this topic, and he has been featured in such high-profile media as the New York Times, the BBC, and Wired. He hopes that his research will provide the fundamental understanding for future mechanical design and technological discoveries of soft robotics. This area of research is thought to lead to the creation of robots that can assist in cleaning the environment, as well as developing theories on how plant roots react to soil. 

 

This semester, Gazzola is also teaching ME 310, Fundamentals of Fluid Dynamics.