Philipp Suhrcke

Philipp Suhrcke joined the MOSAIC group as a Ph.D. student in September 2022. He is originally from Münster, Germany.

From 2015 to 2019, Philipp studied Biomimetics (B.Sc.) at the Hochschule Bremen. During a semester abroad in the Mechatronics Research Lab at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, he investigated the aerodynamic properties of the cheetah tail as an inspiration for robotic systems. He wrote his Bachelor thesis in the group of Prof. Dr. Jan-Henning Dirks, where he looked at the righting mechanism of the Indian stick insect. The results were presented at the SEB Annual Conference 2019 in Seville, Spain.

After his Bachelor’s, Philipp’s interest shifted to computational methods for biological systems, and he enrolled in the Computational Modeling and Simulation (M.Sc.) Master’s program at the TU Dresden in 2019. His interest in active hydrodynamics started with two research projects in which he looked at the dynamics of axisymmetric membranes with curvature-dependent active tension and at vortex methods for 2D active polar fluids. He investigated the flow transitions of active polar fluids in 3D during his Master thesis in the MOSAIC group under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Ivo F. Sbalzarini and Prof. Dr. Frank Jülicher. He implemented a hybrid Lagrangian particle-mesh simulation of active hydrodynamics using OpenFPM and used it to study steady states, instabilities, and generic patterns with focus on active turbulence.

In our group, Philipp works on 3D spatio-temporal simulations of active polar materials as they can be found in cellular structures like the cytoskeleton, a key player in tissue morphogenesis. He uses particle methods for HPC simulations to investigate flow transitions and active turbulence.