Balogh Wins APS Acrivos Dissertation Award

Peter Balogh, a biomedical engineering postdoctoral associate at Duke University, has won the Acrivos Dissertation Award for Fluid Dynamics from the American Physical Society. The award recognizes exceptional young scientists who have performed original doctoral thesis work of outstanding scientific quality and achievement in the area of fluid dynamics.

Balogh received the award for the dissertation he completed at Rutgers University in 2018. Working with Prosenjit Bagchi, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Rutgers, Balogh focused on bio-fluid dynamics. His dissertation detailed the development of a computational method for simulating 3D blood flow through highly complex geometries such as microvessel networks and intricate microfluidic devices, including the deformation and dynamics of each individual blood cell. Using this method, he then simulated red blood cells flowing through physiologically realistic capillary networks and used data from the simulations to provide new insight into the physics of blood flow in such networks of tiny vessels.

At Duke, Balogh works in the laboratory of Amanda Randles, the Alfred Winborne and Victoria Stover Mordecai Assistant Professor of Biomedical Sciences. His research is focused in part on modeling cancer cells and their transport through the body using HARVEY, a state-of-the-art massively parallel computational fluid dynamics code developed by Randles. He is also investigating how vascular networks in the body change and restructure in response to the fluid forces exerted on them, using simulations to replicate experiments performed by collaborators in the Kamm Lab at MIT.