Hydrodynamics at MIT

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In 2024, while at the Research Science Institute, I investigated hydrodynamics at MIT’s Applied Mathematics Laboratory under the direction of Diego Israel Chavez and Prof. John Bush. As a brief summary of my research in the lab:

• I studied the dynamics of a walking silicone oil droplet on variable-topography systems from experimental, theoretical, and computational standpoints. From the experimental perspective, I demonstrated bidirectional tunneling in a novel cavity-geometry and elucidated that droplet coupling accelerates the tunneling process across subsurface physical barriers.
• I also developed the first theoretical framework to incorporate variable-topography systems into analysis of three-dimensional droplet dynamics and tunneling probabilities, and implemented such a model within an end-to-end MATLAB framework to simulate long-time droplet and wave-field evolution with significantly improved accuracy over existing models.
• While at the lab, I interacted with many current graduate students and postdocs (shoutout to Diego, Dave, and Kyle!) and was fortunate to expose myself to their work on fluids, which extends to Hele-Shaw cells, generalized Dirichlet-to-Neumann operators, and magnetohydrodynamics.
• My research was recognized as a [finalist in the 2025 Regeneron Science Talent Search](https://www.societyforscience.org/regeneron-sts/2025-finalists/akilan-sankaran/), where I also won the Samueli Foundation Award.

Here is a preprint of my droplet dynamics work, soon to be submitted for publication in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.