ICTS faculty member Brato Chakrabarti has been awarded the ANRF, PM Early Career Research Grant. The Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) is given to early career researchers, who are playing a crucial role in the country's scientific and technological advancement.
Brato’s research focusses on various fundamental fluid-structure interaction problems at the interface of hydrodynamics at micron scales, transport phenomena, soft and active matter, and biological physics. With support from the ANRF grant, Brato will continue his work on understanding how carpets of motile cilia - hair-like cellular appendages that spontaneously oscillate and are typically found in dense arrays - self-organize through fluid-mediated interaction to form large scale traveling waves on curved topologies. Ciliary carpets play a central role in fluid transport, development, reproduction, and in locomotion of unicellular micro-organisms. Together with his collaborators, Brato is developing coarse-grained models and computational tools that will help us understand how nonequilibrium physics, fluid-structure interactions, and phase synchronization phenomena together conspire to give rise to such emergent dynamics. The work will significantly advance the understanding of coupled cilia in multicellular life at the scale of a whole organism. Their results may inform the design of microswimmers and control strategies of coral ciliates with potential implications for ocean conservation efforts.
ICTS congratulates Brato for this early recognition and encouragement of his excellent work.
