NAMRIP member receives an EPSRC photography award

NAMRIP member Dario Carugo has won second prize in the Innovation category of the 2016 EPSRC Science Photography Competition for a microscope image of ultrasonically induced microstreaming, a relevant topic of Dario’s research at NAMRIP.

The competition aims to support excellence and promote the benefits of outstanding UK engineering and physical sciences.

Dario joined the University of Southampton (Engineering and the Environment) in January 2016 as a New Frontiers Fellow, and is conducting studies on how to manipulate and stimulate biological cells and microbes in a contact-less fashion, using ultrasound waves.

The winning photography was taken whilst he worked at his former laboratory at the University of Oxford (Institute of Biomedical Engineering), on an EPSRC-funded research project led by Professor Eleanor Stride. It shows fluid streamlines generated by a gas microbubble exposed to an ultrasound wave. Upon ultrasound excitation, microbubbles undergo volumetric oscillations which generate a flow of the immediate surrounding fluid in the form of counter-rotating vortices.

This can be potentially employed as a mechanical means to efficiently deliver drugs through tissues or biofilms, or to disrupt bacterial layers. Dario has developed microfluidic systems in order to observe and study these physical phenomena using microscopy techniques.