Abel Abraham

Abel Abraham completed his BS in mathematics and biomedical engineering from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC).  He will be joining the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering to pursue his PhD following his Fulbright-Nehru research period.  Abel’s broad interests are in active matter and its intrinsic connections to biology.  He specifically wants to understand collective behaviors and the emergence of order and organization in multicellular systems.

Abel is an experimentalist who tries to understand complex systems from the perspective of physical and mathematical principles.  During his four-year degree program, while working with Prof. Pedro Saenz at UNC’s Physical Mathematics Lab, he was experimenting with vibrated fluid interfaces, particularly Faraday waves and walking droplets.  His experiments with Faraday waves demonstrated similar statistical features with non-equilibrium systems at different scales, leading to a paper under review of which he is a co-author.  Abel has also done experiments and simulations to show an absence of diffusion in walking droplets which is analogous to the localization of electrons in disordered potentials.  This led to his first-author paper which is also under review.

In his Fulbright-Nehru program, Abel is working with Prof. Shashi Thutupalli in the Simon’s Centre for the Study of Living Machines at the National Centre for Biological Sciences.  He is studying active matter systems of stronger biological connection like active droplets and polymers, and exploring how memory affects the dynamics of these active droplet and polymer systems.  In this process, Abel aims to gain more experience in the space between physics and biology, which is where he will continue working during his PhD.