Targeted transport in complex environments

Swimmers in a branching microfluidic channel moving toward a porous barrier, with target flux and updated geometry and pressure drive — Harnessing coupled dynamics for targeted transport and programmable function.

Transport dynamics in complex environments are essential to the design of industrial and medical systems and fundamental to understanding life. Yet crowding, confinement, viscoelasticity, active processes, interfacial mechanics, and heterogeneous microstructure produce coupled and competing effects on transport, complicating prediction and control while offering new physical mechanisms for design. Across passive and active transport, we investigate how these effects govern diffusion, advection, and locomotion. We study how these dynamics reveal physical and evolutionary constraints on biological motility and can be systematically coarse-grained into advection-diffusion, generalized Taylor dispersion, and related continuum models of transport through complex environments. These principles guide the design and control of synthetic swimmers, soft microrobots, and delivery systems by tailoring geometry, actuation, material properties, and time-dependent protocols for efficient, targeted motion.

Selected work

MPC and System Identification with Differentiable Physics: Fluid System and Particle Beam Control

Alan Williams and Alp Sunol

arXiv · 2026

Learning constitutive models and rheology from partial flow measurements

Alp M. Sunol, James V. Roggeveen, Mohammed G. Alhashim, Henry S. Bae, and Michael P. Brenner

arXiv · 2025

Colloidal Physics Modeling Reveals How Per-Ribosome Productivity Increases with Growth Rate in Escherichia coli

Akshay J. Maheshwari, Alp M. Sunol, Emma Gonzalez, Drew Endy, and Roseanna N. Zia

mBio · 2023