The current research interests of Andrew Poje, Assistant Professor of Physics at The Graduate Center and Mathematics Professor at the College of Staten Island, are centered on the application of geometric ideas from dynamical systems theory to problems involving mixing and stirring in fluid flows. In particular, the research team is attempting to understand how identifiable flow structures (such as eddies and rings in the Gulf Stream and Gulf of Mexico) contribute to and orchestrate the transport of environmentally important properties such as temperature, salt, and biomass in the ocean. The goal is to isolate the evolving boundaries of such structures and to quantify the transport of material relative to these boundaries. Extending existing techniques to complex flow fields produced by numerical simulations of the ocean and relating the geometric information to existing statistical theories of turbulent transport is the subject of a recent National Science Foundation-supported proposal. This approach combines mathematical ideas from non-linear dynamics (chaos theory), geophysical fluid mechanics, and physical oceanography with high resolution data from numerical simulations of various regions of the world's oceans. As such, the research is an interdisciplinary effort involving mathematicians, numerical modelers, and oceanographers.
Team members include, in addition to Professor Poje, Professors Michael Toner and Denny Kirwan at the College of Marine Science, University of Delaware. The research is funded by a new NSF initiative specifically supporting collaborations between the mathematical and geophysical science communities.