ABSTRACT: Penguins provide a striking natural example of anti-icing: despite repeated exposure to sub-freezing air, wind, and seawater, their feathers resist macroscopic ice accumulation. We use this system to examine the fundamental physics of wetting, spreading, heat transfer, and solidification at moving contact lines, with applications to engineered icephobic surfaces for aerospace systems and to controlling droplet deposition and final geometry in dropwise 3D printing. The seminar then turns to the brain, where we apply transport physics to glymphatic fluid flow and waste clearance, including our recent work on neuronal activity-dependent electroosmosis as a possible mechanism for interstitial transport through the highly confined brain parenchyma. We are extending this framework toward brain injury, protein accumulation, Alzheimer’s disease, and chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The common theme is the use of fundamental transport physics to understand and control complex systems across engineering and biology.

BIOSKETCH: Pirouz Kavehpour is Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Bioengineering at UCLA, with a joint appointment in Neurosurgery, and Director of the Complex Fluid & Interfacial Physics Laboratory. He received his B.S. from Sharif University of Technology, his M.S. from the University of Rhode Island, and his Ph.D. from MIT, where his doctoral research focused on moving contact lines and spreading films. His research spans interfacial and complex-fluid physics, heat and mass transfer, microfluidics, biofluidics, non-isothermal flows, and transport in biological systems. Current work includes dropwise 3D printing, penguin-inspired icephobic surfaces, and brain-fluid transport, including glymphatic flow, neuronal activity-dependent electroosmosis, traumatic brain injury, and neurodegenerative disease. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and a recipient of the L. E. Scriven Young Investigator Award and the U.S. Army Young Investigator Award.