December 2023
Congratulations to Sanjib on the publication of his third paper, titled "Aggregation of zooplankton in a Stommel Retention Zone in a laboratory model of Langmuir circulation." This paper was published in a special collection of Limnology and Oceanography exploring life in turbulent waters.
November 2023
APS DFD was held in Washington, D.C., and our group gave 3 great presentations on topics ranging from krill schooling to tiny insect flight to sea angel swimming.
September 2023
Kuvvat Garayev graduated with his PhD! Congratulations to Kuvvat on his graduation and on his new job at Edwards Life Sciences in Irvine, CA.
Congratulations, Dr. Garayev!
End-of-summer lunch at Turkish restaurant to celebrate Kuvvat's graduation
Congratulations, Dr. Garayev!
May 12-20, 2023
Evan Williams and I traveled to Edinburgh, Scotland for a week to visit the lab of Dr. Ignazio Viola, where we are collaborating on the behavior of tiny insects in various flows. We also took some time to go hiking in the Pentland Hills! And Evan stayed in Edinburgh to perform experiments in the VIOLAb all summer!
January 26, 2023
My Biological Fluid Mechanics and Bio-Inspired Design class took a field trip to the Florida Aquarium to see in person the various swimming modes that marine organisms have.
December 2022
Sanjib Gurung successfully defended his dissertation and graduated with his PhD. Congratulations, Dr. Gurung, on your graduation and on your postdoc position in the Cardiovascular Imaging Research Lab at UCLA.
Sanjib's Hooding Ceremony
Congratulations on graduating, Sanjib!
Sanjib gathering zooplankton from Tampa Bay
Sanjib's Hooding Ceremony
November 2022
APS DFD was held in Indianapolis, and our group gave 3 great presentations.
August 17, 2022
Congratulations to Sanjib on the publication of his second paper, titled "An experimental Stommel Retention Zone facility with an application to oil droplet dispersion," which came out in Limnology and Oceanography: Methods.
August 17, 2022
Congratulations to Sanjib on the publication of his second paper, titled "An experimental Stommel Retention Zone facility with an application to oil droplet dispersion," which came out in Limnology and Oceanography: Methods.
August 17, 2022
A new school year has begun, and we got lunch to celebrate this and to celebrate Ali Alshamrani's graduation and departure for Saudi Arabia! Congrats again, Ali!
August 6, 2022
Congratulations to Ali Alshamrani on the completion of his PhD. It was an honor to hood him at the USF commencement ceremony and to meet his family!
Feb 15, 2022
Congratulations to Ali Alshamrani on his first paper, titled "An experimental study of oil slick contraction by chemical herders and fragmentation by obstacles" being published in the journal Cold Regions Science and Technology!
November, 2021
It was great to see everyone in person at APS DFD this year in Phoenix, AZ, where we had 5 presentations.
August 19, 2021
It's the start of a new school year, and to celebrate we had a lab lunch at a local noodle house. Welcome back, everyone!
August 9, 2021
Welcome back to Tampa for Sanjib, who recently completed an NSF-sponsored summer internship at Sonavex, a startup biomedical device company in Baltimore, MD. At the internship, Sanjib performed benchtop experiments and CFD simulations of an arteriovenous fistula. He also was able to explore sites along the East Coast, including the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia (below), which is part of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
May 16, 2021
Congratulations to Kuvvat on the publication of his first paper! The paper, titled "Metachronal Swimming of Mantis Shrimp: Kinematics and Interpleopod Vortex Interactions" was just published in Integrative and Comparative Biology as part of a special symposium on metachronal motion at the SICB 2021 conference.
December 5, 2020
Several members of the lab were able to get together at Lettuce Lake Park for a physically distanced picnic to celebrate Ferhat and Ali finishing up their PhDs (among other exciting life events!). It was great to see (almost) everyone again!
November 27, 2020
PhD student Ali Al Dasouqi published his second article (and his second to appear this month). The article, titled ""Bursting bubbles and the formation of gas jets and vortex rings" was published in Experiments in Fluids. Congratulations, Ali!
November 22-24, 2020
The Murphy Lab had 8 presentations at the 2020 APS Division of Fluid Dynamics (Virtual) meeting this year! See the list below, which included two by undergraduates.
November 12, 2020
Congrats to PhD student Ali Al Dasouqi, who just published his first article, "Gas escape behavior from bursting bubbles" in Physical Review Fluids as part of a Special Collection of papers coming out of the 2019 Gallery of Fluid Motion. Ali's video associated with this paper made a big splash in the media when he presented it at the APS conference in 2019. Well done, Ali!
September 11, 2020
PhD student Sanjib Gurung recently published his first article, "Effects of crude oil vapors on the cardiovascular flow of embryonic Gulf killifish" in the journal Science of the Total Environment. Congratulations to Sanjib!
September 7, 2020
PhD student Ferhat Karakas published his third article today in a special issue of Frontiers in Marine Science. The article is titled "Swimming and sinking behavior of warm water pelagic snails" and has received considerable press attention, with write ups in Science News and SciTechDaily. Congratulations to Ferhat!
August 13, 2020
PhD student Ferhat Karakas published his second article today in the Journal of Experimental Biology. The article is titled "A novel cylindrical overlap-and-fling mechanism used by sea butterflies" and was featured with a write up in Inside JEB as well. Congratulations, Ferhat!
June 15, 2020
PhD student Ferhat Karakas successfully defended his dissertation (titled "Swimming of Pelagic Snails: Kinematics and Fluid Dynamics") today! Congratulations, Ferhat!!!
May 19, 2020
Our research on sea butterfly swimming was highlighted by SciShow, a YouTube channel with over 6 million subscribers! Check out the video below.
December, 2019
Following Dr. Murphy's trip to Palmer Station in November, PhD student Kuvvat Garayev also traveled to Palmer Station, Antarctica to continue our research on krill schooling behavior.
November 22-26, 2019
PhD students Ferhat Karakas and Ali Al Dasouqi and postdoc Carlowen Smith traveled to the 72nd Annual APS Division of Fluid Dynamics (DFD) meeting in Seattle, Washington. The opening reception was held at the Museum of Flight, and everyone's presentations went well. Special congratulations to Ali, who won an award for his entry to the Gallery of Fluid Motion (Gas Escape Behavior from Bursting Bubbles) AND was interviewed by Dr. Tom Crawford of Tom Rocks Maths fame on Youtube AND had his research covered by Science Magazine (link here)!
Gallery of Fluid Motion Award Winner
November 5-27, 2019
Dr. Murphy traveled to Palmer Station, Antarctica to research krill schooling behavior in collaboration with Dr. Marc Weissburg and Dr. David Fields. We collected photogrammetric measurements of krills swimming in groups in a specialized flume and took high speed videos of individually swimming krill.
Rubbing or kissing Magellan's toe supposedly ensures smooth sailing on Drake's Passage. It didn't work for me!
Rubbing or kissing Magellan's toe supposedly ensures smooth sailing on Drake's Passage. It didn't work for me!
October 22, 2019
Undergrad Tristen Mee and Dr. Murphy visited Mr. Daniel Rice's AP Physics class at Middleton High School to talk about biofluid mechanics, bio-inspired design, and life as an undergraduate engineering student. It was super-fun, and the students asked great questions!
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August 30, 2019
The Murphy Lab had a Back-to-School Party to celebrate the start of a new semester. Highlights included fluids-inspired charades and making ice cream!
July 18, 2019
The Murphy Lab is headed to Antarctica! We were just awarded a new grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate the collective behavior of Antarctic krill. The award is from the Office of Polar Programs and is titled "Collaborative Research: Individual Based Approaches to Understanding Krill Distributions and Aggregations." We will be working with Marc Weissburg at Georgia Tech and David Fields and Nick Record at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. Dr. Murphy and PhD student Kuvvat Garayev will perform this research at Palmer Station in the Nov-Dec time frame of 2019, and Kuvvat will return in 2020 to complete the experiments.
May 13-19, 2019
PhD student Kuvvat Garayev, undergrad Josh Arandia, and Dr. Murphy visited our collaborator Amy Maas at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences to continue our research into sea butterfly swimming, to work with Amy and artist Samm Newton on creating a children's book about sea butterflies, and to work with collaborator Margaret Byron on metachronal swimming by ctenophores. It was our fifth trip to BIOS. We collected some great data on the kinematics and hydrodynamics of various sea butterfly species and made some good progress on the children's book, but, unfortunately, no ctenophores were to be found!
A Diacria trispinosa pteropod which performed nicely for the cameras
On a post-dinner walk out to Ferry Point Park
A nudibranch we found (and safely returned to the water) at Concrete Beach at BIOS
A Diacria trispinosa pteropod which performed nicely for the cameras
April 11 & 22, 2019
Dr. Murphy gave a seminar in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Penn State University in early April (hosted by collaborator Dr. Margaret Byron) and a seminar in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Virginia Tech (hosted by collaborator Dr. Olivier Coutier-Delgosha) in late April. It was great to share our work on sea butterfly swimming and tiny insect flight and to see the great work being done in their departments (and to get ice cream at the world-famous Berkey Creamery!).
February 17, 2019
Ali and Ferhat attended the Clearwater Marine Aquarium Marine Science Fest to tell people about the research we are doing on sea butterflies. They also demonstrated a high speed video camera system to visitors.
February 6, 2019
Dr. Murphy is awarded a CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation! The award is from the Fluid Dynamics program and is titled 'CAREER: Aerial and Aquatic Flapping Flight at Low Reynolds Numbers." This grant will allow the Murphy Lab to continue investigating flapping 'flight' by swimming sea butterflies and to begin investigating the flight of tiny insects.
February 3-7, 2019
Carlowen Smith and Dr. Murphy traveled to New Orleans to attend and present at GOMOSES, the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill and Ecosystem Science conference.
January 10-17, 2019
Ferhat Karakas and Dr. Murphy traveled to Canada to attend and present at the 5th Microscale Ocean Biophysics meeting in snowy Whistler, B.C.
A view from the gondola
A view from the gondola
December 21, 2018
We had our second annual lab holiday lunch! Petra Restaurant did not disappoint!
December 7, 2018
We published our first paper which is entirely a product of the Murphy Lab. Congrats to Ferhat for his new paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology, titled 'Using a shell as a wing: pairing of dissimilar appendages in atlantiid heteropod swimming!' The paper was featured with a writeup in Inside JEB as well!
November 18-20, 2018
The Murphy Lab traveled to Atlanta, GA for the 71st Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics (APS DFD). It was a great conference. The opening reception was held in the Georgia Aquarium, and everyone's presentations went well.
October 14-19, 2018
Dr. Murphy and Ferhat Karakas visited our collaborator Amy Maas at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences to research sea butterfly swimming. We collected data on the kinematics and hydrodynamics of sea butterflies. It was our fourth trip to BIOS. The weather cooperated with us reasonably well at the beginning of this trip, and we were able to collect animals three times for experiments. High winds kept us on land towards the end of the trip, so we visited a flooded underground cave system!
The research vessel leaves the dock in the background
The research vessel leaves the dock in the background
September 13-15, 2018
Dr. Murphy's Biological Fluid Mechanics class and lab group took a class trip to visit the Keys Marine Lab in Layton, FL. We had a guest lecture from Dr. Aditya Nayak of FAU about particles in the ocean, went on a snorkeling trip to see the various swimming modes we had discussed in class, and used micro-Particle Image Velocimetry to look at how copepods swim. Thanks to the Florida Institute of Oceanography for supporting this educational experience through a shiptime proposal!
May 8-22, 2018
Dr. Murphy, Ferhat, Ali, and Daniel traveled to the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (BIOS) to again work with collaborator Dr. Amy Maas and to begin work with Dr. Margaret Byron at Penn State and Dr. Damian Grundle at BIOS. We worked on several projects using the unique access to 'critters' that BIOS offers. We studied the propulsion of various sea butterfly species using a cutting-edge, high speed particle tracking velocimetry system (Shake-The-Box PTV - Thanks to LaVision for loaning us the software!). We also studied metachronal swimming in ctenophores and mantis shrimp and began preliminary experimental lab work on how oil slicks may affect air-sea gas transfer under the influence of rainfall. It was a jam-packed two weeks!
Pictures from BIOS Research Trip - May 2018
Ali, Daniel, Ferhat, and Dr. Murphy
Studying metachronal swimming in ctenophores and mantis shrimp with Dr. Margaret Byron
Ali, Daniel, Ferhat, and Dr. Murphy
May 1-2, 2018
Sanjib and Dr. Murphy visited collaborator and developmental biologist extraordinaire Ben Dubansky at the University of North Texas. We spent two days taking high speed footage of the blood flow in embryonic Gulf Killifish as we investigate how exposure to crude oil affects their physiology. Thanks to Ben for the tweet!
Feb 19, 2018
Daniel Olsen and Dr. Murphy visited the Clearwater Marine Aquarium Marine Science Fest to tell folks about our work on sea butterfly swimming. It was great to show our high speed videos to the public, educate people about these amazing little critters, and represent USF!
Feb 16 , 2018
It's been a busy two weeks of travel! Dr. Murphy attended the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill and Ecosystem Science (GOMOSES) conference in New Orleans and then traveled to Portland, Oregon to present work on sea butterfly swimming at the 2018 Ocean Sciences Meeting.
January 8, 2018
Welcome to Kuvvat Garayev and Sanjib Gurung, our two new PhD students, and Ahmet Topcuoglu, who is finishing up his MS this semester and will transition to the PhD program in the fall!
November 27, 2017
Dr. Murphy and Ferhat Karakas gave presentations on the kinematics and fluid dynamics of sea butterfly swimming at the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics conference in Denver, CO.
October 13, 2017
One of our videos of sea butterfly swimming from our recent research trip to Bermuda was featured on the Discovery Channel show 'The Daily Planet!' Here is a link to the segment.
October 2, 2017
Dr. Murphy and graduate student Ferhat Karakas just returned from a second research trip to the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences. Working with Amy Maas, we collected data on the swimming of ctenophores, mantis shrimp, and various pteropod species. We also were joined by our NAKFI-sponsored artist-in-residence, Samm Newton, who is creating art to help interpret our data for the public. Samm also took some great photos of the research trip.
September 21, 2017
Dr. Murphy was part of a successful proposal recently announced by the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative. The project, Turbulent Vertical Mixing and the Formation of Oil Particle Aggregates: LES, Measurements and Modeling, is led by PI Andres Tejada-Martinez of the USF Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
September 1, 2017
The Murphy Lab welcomes its second PhD student, Ali Al Dasouqi. Ali is finishing his MS in Mechanical Engineering here at USF this semester. Welcome!
August 31, 2017
The GOMRI website has two recent stories highlighting our work:
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Aeppli and Murphy Awarded National Academies’ Gulf Research Program Fellowships
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Study Assesses How Chemical Dispersant Affects Oil Plume Behavior
August 8, 2017
Dr. Murphy was selected for an Early Career Research Fellowship by the National Academies of Science Gulf Research Program. The awards aim at "supporting the development of future generations of scientists, engineers, and health professionals prepared to work at the intersections of energy system safety, human health and well-being, and environmental stewardship in the Gulf of Mexico and other U.S. coastal regions."
June 5, 2017
Dr. Murphy was part of three successful proposals recently announced by the National Academies of Science Keck Futures Initiative (NAKFI) as part of the 'Discovering the Deep Blue Sea' conference held in Fall 2016. The three proposals are:
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Swimming across Scales: Metachronal Rowing in the Deep Blue Sea (with Margaret Byron at Penn State)
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Swimming in Sea Butterflies: Physics, Physiology, Ecology, Art, and Design Inspiration for an Aquatic Micro-Aerial Vehicle (with Amy Maas at BIOS)
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Creating Resilience: Building a Gulf of Mexico NAKFI Alumni Working Group (with Brandon Ballengee and others)
May 15-18, 2017
Dr. Murphy presented a poster at the International Oil Spill Conference in Long Beach, CA. The poster was titled "Development of an In Vitro Exposure System for Live Visualization of the Health Impacts of Oily Marine Aerosol on the Human Respiratory System."
May 3-13, 2017
Dr. Murphy, graduate student Ferhat Karakas, and undergraduate student Joseph Bello traveled to the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (BIOS) to work with our collaborator Dr. Amy Maas. We collected high speed video and flow measurements of the swimming behavior of various pteropod species.
Pictures from BIOS Research Trip
A view from the BIOS dock before we set sail to collect animals
Looking back towards the island on our first trip to collect animals
Sunset on the last night of the trip
A view from the BIOS dock before we set sail to collect animals
April 7, 2017
Dr. Murphy was awarded a New Researcher Internal Grant, which will fully fund a research trip to collect preliminary data with a new collaborator at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences.
March 14, 2017
Dr. Murphy was awarded a Grant-in-Aide by the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (BIOS). The award will partially fund a research trip to BIOS to collect preliminary data on sea butterfly swimming.
January 6, 2017
The lab welcomes its first graduate student, Ferhat Karakas! Ferhat joins us after earning an MS in Aerospace Engineering from the Istanbul Technical University. Welcome!