David Saintillan receives 2011 Pi Tau Sigma Gold Medal

Less than ten years after receiving his baccalaureate degree, MechSE Assistant Professor David Saintillan has received the 2011 Pi Tau Sigma Gold Medal. This award is given to a young professor who demonstrates outstanding achievement in mechanical engineering. It was created in 1938 by Pi Tau Sigma and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Saintillan began his academic career at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2008 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering. His research group has been focused on the development of mathematical models and efficient computational tools for problems involving complex fluids, such as particulate suspensions or polymer solutions. His research influences a variety of applications in materials science, microfluidics, biophysics, and other fields.

His most recent research focus includes studying active fluids, such as suspensions of swimming bacteria, to understand the mechanisms leading to collective behavior and self-organization in these systems. Saintillan developed both kinetic theories and numerical simulations to tackle this problem, and he is the first person to derive a criterion for collective behavior to emerge as a result of hydrodynamic interactions between the bacteria. His findings impact diverse potential applications such as the fight against pathogenic infections, or the modeling of mixing and CO₂ capture by microorganisms in the oceans. His work in this area is supported by a prestigious research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Saintillan is also involved in the NSF Center for Compact and Efficient Fluid Power, for which he studies nanoscale additives, such as carbon nanotubes, as a means to enhance the performance of hydraulic pumps. He has received a research grant from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to model particle dynamics in electric fields, with applications to self-assembly and materials science. He works on a number fundamental problems in suspension dynamics (gravity-driven particulate jets, sedimentation), and has been collaborating with a research group at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Marseille France on some of these problems.