Organizers: Yangfan Zhang and I
Confirmed speakers (sort by last name): Saad Bhamla, Michael C., Danielle Chase, Ty Hedrick, Roy Harpaz, Arnold Mathijssen, Nina Mohebbi, Di Ni, Ashley Peterson, and Steven Portugal
sponser by: @sicb.bsky.social @sicb-dcb-dvm.bsky.social @biologists.bsky.social

I had a lot of fun transitioning from playing with fire ants 🐜 in my PhD to experimenting with live fish 🐠! Hopefully, my other projects during the postdoc, one on fish robots and another on the vibration of dead fish, will be out soon too.

We think the ladder formation could provide fish schools hydrodynamic benefits similar to the diamond formation, but further research is required. We are also excited about future research adopting our computer vision pipelines to research the internal structures of other fish species and in nature.

While fish constantly rearranged in three dimensions as we often observe in aquariums and in nature, our data showed that fish prefer a vertically-staggered formation, which we called "ladder formation". This formation has never been characterized before but appeared in as much as 79% of fish pairs.

We recorded 3D fish schools swimming in uniform water flow for ten hours at a time and tracked their relative positions. We found that fish rarely adopt the classical diamond formation, less than 0.1% of the time!

A classical work in 1975 suggested that a planar "diamond" formation is the most hydrodynamically efficient, and still shapes the direction of the fish school research today. Half a century later, we decided to comprehensively test this hypothesis, using cutting-edge computer vision techniques.

Have you ever wondered about how fish self-organize in 3D? Due to various reasons, experimental and theoretical research of fish schools has been limited to planar formations.

I'm thrilled to embark on this new chapter of my academic career at Tufts. I look forward to collaborating with researchers at Tufts and beyond to continue to advance the frontiers of robotics, biomechanics, and collective behavior.

Our goal: robotic swarms capable of adapting to and exploring unstructured underwater ecosystems, from coral reefs to kelp forests.

My future lab, the Kollective Organization Lab (KOLab!), will explore the mechanical interaction within biological collectives like fish schools and develop robotics swarms that harness mechanical intelligence for self-organization.

I'm committed to paying it forward by nurturing the next generation of interdisciplinary researchers who not only excel in their fields but also have a passion for activism and societal impact.

I am deeply grateful for my postdoctoral advisor Prof. Radhika Nagpal, my PhD advisor Prof. David Hu, and the many mentors who have provided invaluable guidance and support throughout my academic journey. It truly takes a village!

My future lab, the Kollective Organization Lab (KOLab!), will explore the collective behavior of biological organisms and biomimetic robots in fluid environments.

Our goal: robotic swarms capable of adapting to and exploring unstructured underwater ecosystems, from coral reefs to kelp forests.

I'm committed to paying it forward by nurturing the next generation of interdisciplinary researchers who not only excel in their fields but also have a passion for activism and societal impact.

I am deeply grateful for my postdoctoral advisor Prof. Radhika Nagpal, my PhD advisor Prof. David Hu, and the many mentors who have provided invaluable guidance and support throughout my academic journey. It truly takes a village!

*POSTDOC JOB* If you are excited about animal sociality/cognition, are computationally-inclined, and are looking for a postdoc, I'll be hiring soon! Please come talk to me today or tomorrow at #SICB2025, or reach out over email. Official ad coming soon!

Be yourself? You'll do great!!

Thank you!