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The University of Florida Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience Evenings at Whitney Lecture Series continues Thursday, December 11, 2025, at 6 p.m. with the program titled “Locomoting in a turbulent world”. Dr. Mimi Koehl, Professor of the Graduate School, Department of Integrative Biology, University of California Berkeley, will be the speaker.
This free lecture will be presented in person at the UF Whitney Laboratory Lohman Auditorium, 9505 Ocean Shore Boulevard, in St. Augustine. Those interested also have the option of registering to watch via Zoom live the night of the lecture.
Register to watch online:
https://ufl.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_2nXB0DIdR2-7MxS6NYJcGA
When microscopic organisms swim in the ocean, they are also carried by turbulent ambient currents that often move faster than the tiny creatures can locomote. Studies of swimming and chemotaxis by microorganisms are usually conducted in still water, whereas large-scale studies of microorganism transport by ambient flow treat them as passive particles. How does the interaction between a microorganism’s swimming through the water and its transport and rotation by turbulent ambient flow affect where it travels through the habitat, what are the environmental signals it encounters along the way, and how do its behavioral responses affect where it goes?
Many bottom-dwelling marine animals produce microscopic larvae that are dispersed to new sites by ambient water currents and then must land on surfaces in suitable habitats. These larvae are a good system for studying how microscopic swimmers navigate in ambient flow because they are weak swimmers with somewhere specific to go: they need to navigate to suitable habitats on the sea floor. Mimi will discuss how they work at the interface between physics and biology to study this question, combining field flow measurements in marine environments with studies in laboratory wave tanks, experiments in fluidic devices, and agent-based models of different locomotory strategies in measured turbulent flow fields.
Mimi Koehl is a professor in the Dept. of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies the physics of how organisms interact with each other and their environments. Mimi is fascinated by biological form, so the goal of her research is to identify basic physical rules that explain how morphology affects the mechanical functions of organisms, to help us understand the performance of diverse types of creatures in different habitats. She uses this approach to address ecological and evolutionary questions. Mimi combines techniques from fluid and solid mechanics with those from biology and ecology to do experiments in the field as well as in the laboratory.
https://ib.berkeley.edu/labs/koehl/
Mimi is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the California Academy of Science. She has received various awards, including: John Martin Award from the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, for research that “created a paradigm shift in an area of aquatic sciences”, Rachel Carson Award from the American Geophysical Union for "cutting-edge ocean science", Borelli Award from American Society of Biomechanics for “exemplary contributions to the field of biomechanics”, Muybridge Award from the International Society of Biomechanics for “career achievement in biomechanics”, and Distinguished Alumni Award, The Graduate School, Duke University.
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