Below I list a few ideas for students projects, which I am eager to work on. The list is by no means exhaustive and I welcome you to come by to discuss opportunities for Bachelor's and Master's thesis projects relating to the theory and simulation of soft matter, hydrodynamics, and biophysics. All the projects below can be done at the Bachelor's and Master's level. We can tailor the focus and ambition of the project to best suit your expertise and curricular needs. My group also has good connections to companies and hosts internship-like projects.
If you are a student interested in project work and are not currently enrolled within the Master's level theoretical physics program at Utrecht University, please ensure that your qualifications are comparable to those required for this program. This will help to avoid any disappointments in requesting project work. In contacting me, please provide a detailed CV (including a list of your marks and accreditation transfer information), details of the content of the courses your have taken in the direction of my research, a statement of financial support, and a motivation letter (maximum 1A4) indicating your reasons for wanting to run a project in my group, your relevant skill set, and your expectations concerning the nature of the project you are interested in.
In this project, you will further develop the analytic and numerical methods required to describe growth and division in model active fluids. This research was initiated with the group of Tyler Shendruk (University of Edinburgh), with whom we will interact closely. There is also the opportunity to work together with Pepijn Moerman (TU Eindhoven) to try to realize this model system using condensate droplets made of DNA Nanostars.
In this project, you will help work out the connection between arrested dynamics in hard-sphere and hard-disk systems with and without friction and regular geometric and topologically protected arrangements of those particles. These arrangements appear to impose the volume fraction for the onset of arrest, but how this works remains unclear. You will learn new numerical techniques and analysis methods, as well as connect to experimental observations in granular and colloidal systems.
In this project, you will develop numerical methods that you can use to investigate the way cancerous and healthy cells interact with each other. The project will be run together with my PhD student, Hossein Nemati. We would encourage any student interested in this to also interact with the experimental group of Saskia Suijkerbuijk (Utrecht University).
Bacteria form colonies by cell division. This process is inherrently complex and the various factors that go into the formation of the bacterial community are not well understood. In this project, you will develop simple simulation algorithms to investigate the process of the growth and development of a bacterial community. In addition, you will learn to use advanced regression methods to extract PDEs from the growing colony shapes, from which we can infer elements of the interaction between bacteria. Matching to real-world experiments is a long-term outcome of the project.
In this project, you will use theoretical and numerical approaches to investigate the behavior of colloidal helices sedimenting in a viscous liquid. Describing falling objects in vacuum is one of the first things covered in any mechanics course. But things become quite counterintuitive when small objects fall in a liquid: a rod will fall at a constant angle with respect to gravity. You can expect to learn about hydrodynamic theory, as well as a range of numerical and analytic approaches to solve the Stokes equations. N.B. This project has connections to the activities of Prof. dr. A. Morozov of the University of Edinburgh.
In two-dimensional active nematics the +1/2 topological defects are self-propelled by a break of the symmetry. In 3D, defects come in lines, which can close to form loops. This project asks how to make knotted defect lines and under which circumstances they self-propel.
This project sets out to develop theoretical and numerical tools to understand the behavior of colloidal gels under shear. You can expect to learn about hydrodynamic equations, the way to couple colloid density distributions to the body force acting on the fluid, and much more.
In this project, you will use concepts from bacterial growth to identify knots by associating them with a class of graphs. Previous projects in this direction laid the algorithmic groundwork, identified graphs and Plateau surfaces for some knots, but there is ample room to make the analysis more robust.
Active filaments are known to knot, tangle, wrap, and chemically self-shape. Here, we aim to show that chemical steering plus growth (and contact locking) can promote repeatable loop insertion, which is the elementary building block of knitting and crochet.