User:Yueyao guo/sandbox

Kakani Katija (1983 - present) is a bioengineer from Hawaii. While earning her Master's and PhD in Aeronautics and Bioengineering, Katija began to study the mechanics of swimming and feeding marine organisms.

Kakani Katija completed her bachelor's degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics at the University of Washington in 2004. She furthered her studies, earning a Master's in Aeronautics in 2005 at the California Institute of Technology (CIT) and her Doctorate at CIT in 2010 in Bioengineering.

Katija was awarded research fellowships from both the American Society for Engineering Education and the National Science Foundation to conduct graduate research. As a certified research diver, she has conducted field studies in various locations throughout the world, such as a study completed in 2009 off the coast of the Palau archipelago. The goal of this study was to understand the physics involved in the jellyfishes' movements. Instead, what they discovered was that the jellyfish not only push water into their bells, but drag an almost constant flume of water behind them. That discovery propelled Katija to study how much marine life contribute to mixing the ocean. Katija's discovery has led her to explore how much sea creatures mix fluid in the ocean at rates comparable to winds and tides.

She was named an Emerging Explorer from the National Geographic Society in 2011 and as part of the award, a research dive in Panama was filmed in 2012 by National Geographic Society. In 2013, she was named a Kavli Research Fellow from the National Academy of Sciences and is currently working in Moss Landing, California at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute as a Postdoctoral Fellow.

Her interest of research are focused on bio-inspired engineering design, experimental fluid dynamics, biogenic mixing, propulsive mechanisms of marine organisms, biological fluid mechanics, and ocean energy extraction.

Professional experience:

She is currently a postdoctoral investigator at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution since 2012. Her field of research includes biogenic mixing by multiple organisms, which is about experimental and computational investigation of flow fields and disruption of fluid stratification by individual and multiple swimming organisms, measurements to be conducted in WHOI PIV lab, during Tioga field excursions, and Australian Antarctic Division (with Steve Nicol and So Kawaguchi) in Tasmania. She also studies in three-dimensional profiling turbulence measurements. In this field, work is done by adapting three-dimensional particle image velocimetry techniques for oceanographic profiling measurements of microstructure and turbulence. There is also proposal funded by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Cecil and Ida M. Green’s Technology Innovation Award. The third area of research is in robotic jet-propelled medusae, which involves experimental and computational investigation of propulsive performance by underwater vehicle inspired by Sarsia tubulosa, a fast-contracting, jet-propelled medusae, as well as measurements to be conducted in WHOI PIV lab, simulations to be conducted at Virginia Tech. She also studies single organism dynamics extrapolated to multiple-jetting, colonial siphonophores.

Between 2010 and 2012, she was the postdoctoral scholar at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, specializing in fluid transport mechanisms of swimming animals.