Call for contributions to our symposium on animal collective movement in complex environments at SICB 2026 in Portland, OR! Submit your abstract to our complementary sessions and join us for two days of fun discussing and exchanging research on the biomechanics and energetics of animal movement!

I had a lot of fun transitioning from playing with fire ants 🐜 in my PhD to experimenting with live fish 🐠! Hopefully, my other projects during the postdoc, one on fish robots and another on the vibration of dead fish, will be out soon too.

While fish constantly rearranged in three dimensions as we often observe in aquariums and in nature, our data showed that fish prefer a vertically-staggered formation, which we called "ladder formation". This formation has never been characterized before but appeared in as much as 79% of fish pairs.

We recorded 3D fish schools swimming in uniform water flow for ten hours at a time and tracked their relative positions. We found that fish rarely adopt the classical diamond formation, less than 0.1% of the time!

Have you ever wondered about how fish self-organize in 3D? Due to various reasons, experimental and theoretical research of fish schools has been limited to planar formations.

I am excited to share that my first postdoc research paper is out!! Thanks to the great collaboration with Radhika Nagpal and Abigail Girma at Princeton Engineering and @georgelauder.bsky.social , Yangfan Zhang, and Yu Pan at @harvardoeb.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Presenting my postdoctoral project designing a free-swimming fish-like robot called BlueGuppy at #APS #DFD ! meetings.aps.org/Meeting/DFD2...