The jellyfish has been the subject of numerous mathematical and physical studies ranging from the discovery of reentry phenomenon in electrophysiology to the development of axisymmetric methods for solving fluid-structure interaction problems. In this presentation, we develop and test mathematical models describing the pulsing dynamics and the resulting fluid flow generated by the upside down jellyfish, Cassiopea. The kinematics of contraction and distributions of pulse frequencies were obtained from videos and used as inputs into numerical simulations. Particle image velocimetry was used to obtain spatially and temporally resolved flow fields experimentally. The immersed boundary method was then used to solve the fluid-structure interaction problem and explore how changes in morphology and pulsing dynamics alter the resulting fluid flow. Unlike pelagic (swimming) jellyfish, there is no evidence of the formation of a train of vortex rings. Instead, significant mixing occurs around and directly above the oral arms and secondary mouths. We found good agreement between the numerical simulations and experiments, suggesting that the presence of porous oral arms induce net horizontal flow towards the bell and mixing.

In order to better understand wound contraction fibroblast populated collagen lattices have been studied for many years.  In this talk I will discuss mathematical models for lattice contraction.  The models are formulated with components at the cellular and sub cellular level with the goal of understanding the macroscopic behavior of the lattice.

Strikingly regular, large-scale patterns of vegetation growth were first documented by aerial photography in the Horn of Africa circa 1950 and are now known to exist in drylands across the globe. The patterns often appear on very gently sloped terrain as bands of dense vegetation alternating with bare soil, and models suggest that they may be a strategy for maximizing usage of the limited water available. A particular challenge for modeling these patterns is appropriately resolving fast processes such as surface water flow during rainstorms while still being able to capture slow dynamics such as the uphill migration of the vegetation bands, which has been observed to occur on the scale of a band width per century. We propose a pulsed-precipitation model that treats rainstorms as instantaneous kicks to the soil water as it interacts with vegetation on the timescale of plant growth. We use a stochastic rainfall model with the influence of fast storm-level hydrology captured by the spatial distribution of the soil water kicks. The model allows for predictions about the influence of storm characteristics on the large-scale patterns. Analysis and simulations suggest that the distance water travels on the surface before infiltrating into the soil during a typical storm plays a key role in determining the spacing between the bands.