Krishna Garikipati Completes Humboldt Fellowship
Krishna Garikipati
Associate Professor Krishna Garikipati is completing a 16-month Humboldt Research Fellowship. The prestigious and competitive fellowships are given by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to promising scientists in early stages of their careers. A small number of senior scientists, typically having completed at least 20 years of work in a field, are considered for Humboldt Awards. More than 20,000 scholars from 125 countries have earned fellowships or awards, including many Nobel Prize winners.
Garikipati has spent his term as fellow at the University of Stuttgart, working with hosts Professor Christian Miehe and Professor Ekkehard Ramm. Miehe chairs the Institute of Applied Mechanics, and Ramm just stepped down as chair of the Institute of Structural Mechanics.
Garikipati's work focuses on mathematical models for growth and remodeling of biological materials, the physics and mechanics of stress-defect interactions in semiconductors and numerical methods for certain phenomena described by high-order partial differential equations.
At the University of Stuttgart, he has been working with Miehe to develop ideas about the microstructural basis for the mechanical response of soft biological tissues. The tissues are organized into chain-like structures at many spatial scales and bear resemblance to polymeric structures, he explained. Drawing on classical work on chain-like structures, Garikipati is exploring the appropriateness of entropic and energetic models for the elasticity of soft biological tissues, work he also does at U-M with colleagues Ellen Arruda and Karl Grosh.
Additionally, at the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart, Garikipati is investigating collaborative work with Professor Huajian Gao's group in the area of cell mechanics. Being situated in Europe has also meant that Garikipati can more easily visit and work with colleagues and former students in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Greece. He has presented about a dozen talks in these locations as a result.
The fellowship experience has been an extremely valuable one for Garikipati. "The reason I am in academics is that I like to think about the physics of interesting systems, how to describe them mathematically and compute solutions to problems involving these systems. At this stage in my career, the fellowship has given me an unparalleled opportunity to conduct unfettered research along these lines. I believe it will change my work in a qualitative manner."
