Faculty
Experience
2024 - present
2018 - 2024
2017 - 2018
Assistant Professor, Dept of Applied Mechanics and Biomedical Engineering, IIT madras
DST INSPIRE faculty, Dept of Chemical Engineering, IISc Bangalore
Postdoctoral fellow, Dept of Chemical Engineering, IIT Madras
Education
2011 - 2017
2007 - 2011
MS-PhD dual degree, IIT Madras.
Thesis: Drops as agents: understanding complex behaviour of droplets in 2D microchannels.
B.Tech, Dept of Chemical Engineering, AC Tech, Anna University.
Project: Enhancing TiO2 based photo-catalysts for pollutant degradation under visible light irradiation (UGC funded).
I am an Assistant Professor at the Dept of Applied Mechanics and Biomedical Engineering at IIT Madras. I work in the area of complex systems engineering where I study systems made up of many interacting entities or agents that exhibit collective phenomena. During my PhD at IITM, I studied how droplets behave in 2D microchannels — from forming complex shaped arrangements to exhibiting avalanches of coalescence events that destabilised the system. And during my INSPIRE tenure at IISc, I diversified from looking at purely material systems and started exploring a range of different biological collectives. I have worked with cells, where the movement depends on both activity and hydrodynamics, social-animals, where motion is primarily behavioural, and humans, where the agents are capable of high levels of cognition. I collaborate with a wide variety of researchers from Biological sciences to Civil engineering. I also collaborate with industry — some of the work I do find applications in healthcare and diagnostics research. In general, I love studying collectives and group phenomena. Whenever I see an army of ants I like to perturb them to see how they respond or sometimes I just like to stare at the flow of vehicular traffic and observe the peculiarities of Indian traffic. I am also very much interested in music. I am a pianist by training, and have completed my grade 8 in Piano from ABRSM (Royal school of music) and some music-theory. Also, I have been a choir conductor in my church for more than a decade. As a complex systems guy, conducting a choir is a fascinating thing to do — since a choir is a collective. There are lot of interesting phenomena that happen as the choristers sing in a choir (check out my blog article "collective nature of choral singing"). Finally, I am someone who enjoyed my time during my PhD. God gave me a good set of friends with whom I could have meaningful and honest conversations on both research and about life and reality in general. I have often had my principles and world-views challenged which helped me become a better version of myself. Hence, I truly wish that every student who enters the IIT system gets a fulfilling experience (through the ups and downs) that shapes them into a fine individual, who is full of life, always aiming high, both in work and in behaviour.
Current members
PhD scholar
Elambirai Ravichandran
I am a Mechanical Engineer by training with a penchant for robotics. I enjoy solving problems, in general, where I leverage my interdisciplinary skills to designing and building (robotics) systems. At CoPhe lab, I plan to work in the area of swarm robotics and bio-inspired algorithms to engineer intelligent collective behaviour. Outside academics I am a track and field athlete who is also interested in weight lifting.
Final year project
Balagopal Nair
I am a BS MS final year student from IISER Pune. I study the dynamics of heterogeneous microscopic collectives.
Past students IISc, IITM
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Vijay Kumar (Observing and inferring the dynamics of composite agents in a complex system) [Project associate; 2019]
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Karthikeya Sharma (Investigating the underlying rules of interaction between vehicles in Indian traffic) [Intern; 2020]
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Arshed Nabeel (Fish school turning) [In collaboration: Vishwesha] [Project associate; 2019]
- Arvind Nayak (Traffic of agents with memory) [Project associate; 2019]
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Vijay Kumar (Mesoscale dynamics of finite school) [In collaboration: Vishwesha] [Project associate; 2020]
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Aman Prasad (Indian Traffic: collecting data and developing the tracking algorithm) [Intern; 2019]
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Vivek Jadhav (Cohesion in fish schools) [Master's project, project associate; in collaboration with Vishwesha Guttal: 2021]
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Pritha Kundu (Boundary effects on schooling of fish) [Co-guided MSc, CES, IISc: 2022]
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Harishankar Muppirala (Data-driven discovery of interdroplet interactions in microchannels; Tracking and analyzing sperm-cell motion.) [Project associate; 2022]
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Arshed Nabeel (Inferring agent-characteristics from movement data of a heterogeneous collective) [Project associate: 2022]
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Muthu Krishnan (Image analysis of sperm-cell movement videos) [Intern: 2022]
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Chandru (Creating a platform to test the state of the art sperm-trajectory analysis algorithms) [Intern: 2022]
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Diksha Kumari (Optical flow algorithms for sperm cell motility assessment) [Intern: 2023]
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Kiran Naik K (Entropy based crowd-risk prediction) [Co-guided MTech, Civil Engg, IISc: 2023]
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Rupesh Mahore (Intelligent crowd movement & Sperm cell motility project) [Project associate: 2023]
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Rasheed S G M (Deriving equations from data for an intruder falling through a granular fluid) [Intern: 2024]
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Ramesh Kumar P (Visualising the dynamics of collective motion) [Intern: 2024]
Collaborations (past and present)
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Prof Vishwesha Guttal, Dept. of Ecological Sciences, IISc Bangalore, India
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Prof Jason Ryan Picardo, Dept. of Chemical Engineering, IIT Bombay, India
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Prof Varsha Singh, School of Biosciences, University of Dundee, Scotland, UK
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Prof Ashish Verma, Civil Engineering, IISc India
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Prof Ashwin Lal, Shilps Sciences, Bengaluru (Droplet microfluidics company)
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Prof K V Venkatesh, Dept of Chemical Engg, IIT Bombay (Metflux Research Private Limited, Mumbai)
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Prof V Kumaran, Dept. of Chemical Engineering, IISc Bangalore, India
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Prof Guy Theraulaz, Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale, CNRS, France
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Prof Raghunathan Rengaswamy, Dept. of Chemical Engineering, IIT Madras, India