Bacteria and bacterial biofilms: Interplay of physical mechanisms and biofilm formation Dr. Aloke Kumar Tuesday, May 3 10:00 am ME2054 Abstract Bacteria in natural and artificial environments often reside in self-organized, integrated communities known as biofilms. Understanding and controlling the growth of biofilms, which are inevitable in most aqueous systems, promises to hugely impact biomedical, industrial and environmental applications. Today there exist fundamental gaps in the understanding of interplay of physical mechanisms and biofilm processes due to the inherent heterogeneity and multi-scale nature of these biological soft materials. Over the last few years, my group has focused on fundamental understanding of biofilm growth and their control using micro-fluidic platforms. In particular, we have discovered that biofilms, in the presence of low Reynolds number flows, degenerate into filamentous structures governed primarily by the viscoelastic nature of biofilms. Formation of such streamers is an important puzzle in the field and microfluidic devices offer a degree of control previously unavailable to study them. About the speaker: Dr. Aloke Kumar is currently the Canada Research Chair in Microfluidics for Biological Systems and Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Alberta, Canada. Prior to that, he was the Wigner fellow at Oak Ridge National Labs, Tennessee, USA. He received his Bachelors and Masters degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India in 2005 and his Ph.D in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA in 2010. He is also the editorial board member of the Nature publishing house journal Scientific Reports. If you're interested in meeting with Dr. Kumar, please reply to Steve Wereley (wereley@purdue.edu<mailto:wereley@purdue.edu>). Dr. Kumar will be available for meetings on Tuesday, May 3, and Wednesday, May 4. Steve Wereley, Professor of Mechanical Engineering Birck Nanotechnology Center, Room 2019, 1205 West State Street Purdue University West Lafayette, IN 47907 phone: 765/494-5624, fax: 765/494-0539 web page: http://engineering.purdue.edu/~wereley