Dr Yohan Davit

I’m broadly interested in (1) biological physics, mathematics and modeling, (2) multiple-scale physics, (3) transport phenomena in porous media and (4) three-dimensional imaging techniques.

During my master’s thesis, I worked on the rheology of confined suspensions and its application to blood flows through capillaries. We used a finite volume formulation to model the flow of a suspension of non-deformable non-Brownian hard spherical particles confined between two walls in a shear flow. For concentrations above 25%, we found that this viscosity meets a minimum when the inter-wall distance is around five times the sphere radius, which is reminiscent to the Fahraeus-Lindqvist effect for blood flows.

More recently, my PhD research has focused on multiple-scale analysis of transport phenomena in porous media with biofilms. Biofilms are complex consortia of micro-organisms (primarily bacteria, fungi, archaea, and protists, although others may be present) that are aggregated on surfaces and coated within an extracellular polymeric matrix. In porous media (e.g. subsurface soil or rocks, or the riverine hyporheic zone), biofilm growth within the pore space can induce substantial modifications to mass and momentum transport dynamics on a much larger scale. In order to understand and model these interactions, we have applied a multidisciplinary approach to tackle problems with imaging the spatial distribution of microbes within opaque porous structures and modeling the transport phenomena in such heterogeneous sytems.

At OCCAM, I'm now working on hybrid discrete/continuous multiscale models for biological tissue growth, including tumors and biofilms. This project is developed in close collaboration with the CHASTE project (http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/chaste/).