Group

Alec Linot

Assistant Professor, Chemical Engineering, UMass-Amherst, 2025 – Present

Postdoc, UCLA, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, 2025
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin - Madison, Chemical and Biological Engineering, 2023
B.S., Kansas State University, Chemical Engineering, 2017

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at UMass-Amherst. My group focuses on using computation and theory to model, control, and analyze a variety of fluid flows. I am particularly interested in systems that exhibit sustained chaotic dynamics, and the transition mechanisms to chaos. Wall-bounded Newtonian turbulence is a canonical example of a chaotic fluid system, but many other fluid systems can exhibit chaotic behavior, such as bacteria aggregation, viscoelastic flows, and Rayleigh–Bénard convection.

Shivam Niphade

PhD Student, Chemical Engineering, Umass-Amherst, 2025 - Present

B.Chem., Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai, 2025

Shivam is a PhD student from India. During his bachelor’s at ICT Mumbai, he worked on waste-salt valorisation for a dye manufacturing industry, where he developed and optimized a process to recover ultrapure salts and evaluated its technical and economic feasibility. He also interned at Henkel ASC in Pune, focusing on improving the storage stability of PVC Plastisol used in automotive underbody coatings. Currently, his research centers on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), where he develops numerical and Machine Learning based methods to model, analyze, and control fluid flows and chaotic dynamical systems. Outside of academics, he enjoys traveling, observing nature, and cycling.