4. Working/collaborating with people from all over the world. Particularly thanks to my time at @mpipks.bsky.social and @csbdresden.bsky.social, I get to talk to scientists from over a dozen countries. It's pretty wild. Without a doubt, science is stronger together! 🇿🇦🇩🇪🇬🇷🇪🇸🇨🇲🇬🇧🇺🇸🇱🇰🇮🇷🇮🇹🇫🇷🇮🇳🇿🇼🇪🇹🇺🇬🇳🇱🇦🇲🇱🇺🇨🇳

3. Applying for a Visa every year 🛂 (guess what I was busy with yesterday...). Getting to travel for conferences and visits is a huge privilege. The expense, bureaucracy and time needed for Visas is crazy though 😵‍💫 If you've got a strong passport, enjoy it! And spare us 3rd world souls a thought...

2. Fluid dynamics. Now, that's not the most surprising pastime for an applied mathematician. But after being scarred by undergrad FD, I never thought I'd make friends with Navier and Stokes again (although now it's in biological active fluids, so Navier-Stokes++). Never rule anything out!

1. The one that sparked this idea: Working with videos of actual real cells moving around, recorded through a microscope. I didn't do the experiments, but just doing the image analysis has given me even more respect for the Squishy Specialists who do this all the time 🔬🧬🫡

But Hark! Most suddenly exploding
At once, everywhere, everything
Not a puff in sight
Nothing local, not even quite
Discontinuous, without hydro screening

Now cranking activity higher
A vortex emerged from the mire
A pair then a trio
Elongated and 𝘤𝘰𝘯 𝘣𝘳𝘪𝘰
Even oscillating, they never did tire

The fuel at first was low
And speed commensurately slow
Everything was laminar
To the closest examiner
But there's more than just shear flow

There once was an active nematic
Whose motion was most acrobatic
Chaotically it swirled
The threads they all twirled
But the cause was rather dramatic

It is Friday. That seems like a good enough reason to write silly poetry about active turbulence. So in this thread, I present to you my "summary" of the recent preprint with @ricardalert.bsky.social (arxiv.org/abs/2501.06085), in four limericks 🧵 (see Ricard's thread for a real summary!)

Buckle up, browsers of Bluesky. This is one for the metalheads 🧑‍🎤 🔊🔊🔊
What happens after the simple shear flow breakdown in active nematics? Sometimes, a driven rhythmic oscillation 🎸 OK, I'll stop, no more rock-it science.
Not all my simulations are at the disco!
🎶: Broken Hands by For All Eternity

Nothing to do with science this time. But despite my near-zero selfie skills, I think we can all appreciate how extraordinarily beautiful Cape Town is ⛰️🌊 In all honesty though, this picture was taken to use my southern hemisphere privilege and spark cycling envy in @lepuslapis.bsky.social 🚴

Since I haven't posted this here, I invite you to enjoy what I like to think of as the "Audiovisual Disco Abstract" for the preprint with @ricardalert.bsky.social 🔉(see:
bsky.app/profile/rica...).
One day "Audiovisual Disco Abstract" will be a required submission field to all journals 🪩

New year, new social media platform, and very excitingly a new job! After a wonderful two years postdocing @mpipks.bsky.social, I am very excited to be back at the University of Cape Town as a lecturer in Applied Maths. It is still a bit surreal, I must say.