MechSE’s Saintillan receives NSF CAREER grant

Assistant Professor David Saintillan has been awarded a CAREER grant on “Electrokinetic transport of fluid, particles, and macromolecules in nanochannels and nanopores” from the Particulate and Multiphase Flow program of the Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, & Transport Systems Division of the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF's Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) initiative selects the nation's best young university faculty in a highly competitive annual program. These scholars are recognized for their extraordinary promise to integrate research and education in the nation's universities and to make lifelong contributions to their disciplines.

Saintillan’s research is in fluid dynamics, complex fluids, microfluidics, and biophysical fluid mechanics. His research group specifically focuses on microscale flow modeling and develops computational and theoretical models for transport phenomena at small scales. The ultimate goal of these efforts is to provide novel models and simulation tools applicable to many engineering applications.

His CAREER grant project entails developing numerical simulations of transport phenomena in nanoscale devices, where modeling efforts are usually limited by the inability of classical models to capture certain non-continuum effects, and by the high-cost of direct molecular simulations. He hopes that this research will improve the fundamental understanding and modeling of electrokinetic flows and macromolecular transport in strongly confined geometries. Such understanding could lead to new solutions to various problems in physics, engineering, and medicine.

"The main focus of this project is the development of accurate and efficient models for the simulation of fluid, particle, and macromolecular transport under electric fields in nanoscale channels or pores,” Saintillan said. “Such transport phenomena are relevant to many technological applications, including lab-on-chip devices for biochemical separation and analysis, and certain types of fuel cells that rely on nanoporous membranes.”

Saintillan is planning to introduce a new graduate-level course on fundamentals and applications of micro- and nanofluidics, including electrokinetic flows. He also intends to create a tutorial website on electrokinetics and its applications for students and non-specialists, and a visualization software for diffuse charge dynamics and electrochemical transport to be made available online for students and researchers in the field.

“The main objective is to improve our fundamental understanding of the underlying physics, while providing reliable design tools for the optimization of engineering applications,” Saintillan said.

Before joining the MechSE Department in 2008, Saintillan was an associate research scientist at the Courant Institute of New York University and a graduate student researcher at Stanford University. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University (2003, 2006), after receiving his B.S. in Engineering from Ecole Polytechnique in France (2001).

Saintillan has recently been offered a one-month invited professorship at ESPCI in Paris, funded by TOTAL, as part of a new Chair in "Sciences focused on Energies, Carbon and the Environment.” The Chair will be developing knowledge and novel, viable, and environmentally friendly solutions for the production, storage, and use of energy and carbon. Saintillan is a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Physical Society, the Society of Rheology, the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the Society of Engineering Science. He was the recipient of the Andreas Acrivos Dissertation award in Fluid Mechanics of the American Physical Society in 2007, and of the Pi Tau Sigma Gold Medal in Mechanical Engineering in 2011.