Our people | Pan-Lab: an Interdisciplinary Kitchen for Fluid Physics

Principal investigator

Zhao Pan

Growing up near the border of China and Mongolia, Zhao decided to go places when he was little. After a long journey through many schools in China, Thailand, Belgium, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, Zhao joined the University of Waterloo as a professor in late 2019. Zhao's research interests span from fluids, biomechanics, dynamics and controls, to data assimilation and machine intelligence. Zhao looks into interesting, sometimes silly, things to fill his curiosity. He enjoys basketball, art, and food.

Graduate students

Ming Yuan Nie

Ming Yuan is from Beijing, China. Before joining the University of Waterloo as an PhD student, he studied at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (BUAA) and obtained bachelor's and master's degree there. Mingyuan is interested in experimental fluid mechanics, especially volumetric particle tracking velocimetry (PTV) and diagnostics of micro-fluidics. He enjoys reading, programing, badminton and hanging out with friends.

Joshua Wawryk

Joshua’s thesis research focuses on the modeling of ship-ice interaction. He aims to develop a reduced order model that is accurate enough to predict the dynamics of ship-ice-water interaction, yet computationally cheap enough to be used for future data assimilation applications. Joshua is co-advised by professor Jean-Pierre Hickey, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) expert at the University of Waterloo.

Lanyu Li

Lanyu’s current research focuses on meshless scheme and experimental methods for volumetric particle tracking velocimetry (PTV). He is carrying on a collaborative project involving engineers and mathematicians from UK, US, and Canada. He aims to develop a robust post-processing method to extract more information from volumetric PTV data. Before joining Pan-Lab, Lanyu was a graduate student at Beijing Institute of Technology. He received his bachelor's degree from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Lucas Tang

Driven by personal struggles with insomnia, he traveled the world during his third year to find inspiration and came back revitalized, with an invention, patents, and a startup company Lumos Health to create smart light-therapy glasses for better sleep and wellness. At Pan-Lab, Lucas will be working on interdisciplinary research topics to expand the technology span of Lumos Health in microfluids, smart wearables, and machine intelligence for mental and physical wellness.

Undergraduate research assistants

Mabel (Xian Yu) Song

Mabel is a Mechanical Engineering undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo. She is passionate about bridging the beauty of physics and engineering applications. She is a visual learner and her thinking is driven by images. Mabel’s current research focuses on droplets on fibre networks and micro-robots moving in granular matter.

Rachel DiTommaso

Rachel is an undergraduate Mechanical Engineering student from New York City, who writes music in her spare time. Rachel’s research focuses on developing minimum energy human gait model, co-advised by professor Dan Hu at Coventry University in the United Kingdom.

Corwin MacMillan

Corwin is an undergraduate mechanical student at the University of Waterloo. He is currently researching ice flow identification for arctic ship traversal. He also enjoys research opportunities in the fields of robotics, control systems, and machine learning. In his spare time, Corwin tends to work on his programming skills but also enjoys customizing shoes and watching YouTube videos concerning math and science. He hopes to have a website developed soon that demonstrates his skillset and interests. His first academic paper was accepted to a leading journal in early 2021, preprint is available at arXiv.

Matthew Faiella

Matthew is from Vaughan, Ontario. He is studying Mechanical Engineering at the University of Waterloo and he is especially interested in fluid dynamics, CFD, and heat transfer. At UWaterloo, Matthew has worked on lots of design projects, including a children’s tower-building toy, a hyperloop pod and a device for sterilizing objects with ozone. He has also done co-ops at several different companies including Toyota and Hatch. Matthew co-authored a journal paper with Corwin and professor Pan after his 3A term in ME 303. He loves hockey and baseball, hiking, and playing guitar on his spare time.

Tom Wang

Tom is an undergraduate Mechanical Engineering student from Singapore living in Calgary, Alberta. He enjoys being outdoors a lot, and is particularly enjoys cross country cycling, mountain climbing and fly-fishing in rivers. His research areas are in data assimilation, particle filtering, computer vision and deep learning. He is also interested in pursuing projects in control systems, stochastic processes and data driven system identification in the future.

Gary You

Gary is an undergraduate Mechanical Engineering student from Vancouver. He loves spending his time travelling, eating and golfing. He is leading the design and testing of novel hiking shoes.

Visitors

Peng Xu

Peng is currently a PhD student at Tsinghua University in China. Her main research interests are cavitation bubble dynamics and cavitating flow. She published her first paper in J. Fluid Mech. with Pan-Lab. The work is mostly based on her undergraduate capstone project.

Youxin Gou

Yuxin is from Jilin, China. She is currently a PhD student at Harbin Engineering University. Her research interests lay in cavitation bubble dynamics and computational fluid dynamics. She is jointly trained in Pan-Lab at the University of Waterloo for experimental and computational studies on cavitation. In her spare time, she loves cooking, hiking and running marathons.