Welcome to UCSB’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Fluids (CIRF). Fluid mechanics plays a fundamental and central role in a wide range of active research areas connecting seemingly disparate fields. Within engineering, it is at the heart of novel technologies for the generation, conversion and storage of energy, and key to conceiving advanced biomedical devices, novel materials, and innovative transportation concepts. In biology and medicine, progress in research fields such as animal locomotion and transport phenomena within the human body will require advances in our understanding of flow physics. Environmental and climate research pose difficult challenges to the fluid mechanics community in terms of understanding and modeling the dynamics of the oceans, lakes, rivers, glaciers and atmosphere, and the flow of groundwater in aquifers.
Many fundamental issues in fluid mechanics research, such as the nature of turbulence, multiphase and interfacial fluid dynamics, micro- and nanofluid mechanics, are addressed mostly within Engineering and Physics departments. However, consistent with the importance of fluid mechanics across a wide range of disciplines, the UCSB campus has a large number of researchers distributed over many research units who share a strong interest in various aspects of fluid mechanics. CIRF was formed to promote scientific interactions and interdisciplinary collaborations among the UCSB fluids community, and to enhance the educational opportunities for our graduate students.
