THE SOCHA LAB

Congrats to Ph.D. student Talia Weiss, who was selected as a VSGC Graduate Research Fellow for the 2018-2019 academic year. The Virginia Space Grant Consortium (VSGC) awarded her $6,000 for her project, "Mechanisms of interfacial locomotion in the Indian skipper frog”. Great news!

We're happy to announce that Joshua Pulliam will be joining the lab as a Ph.D. student in the Engineering Mechanics program, starting in the Spring 2019 semester. Josh is in a dual degree program at Morehouse College, first receiving a B.S. in applied physics degree from Morehouse, and then moving to Auburn University to earn a B.S. in mechanical engineering. Josh will likely be conducting his Ph.D. research in the area of animal locomotion. Thanks to everyone who helped to

Today our paper on how mosquitoes drink was published in Scientific Reports. This paper was long in the making, with data collected by lead author Kenji Kikuchi (and myself and Wah-Keat Lee) in the mid 2000's. We added a modeling component that helps to make sense of the main finding, a newly discovered "burst" mode of pumping used during drinking. We are excited that this paper is finally out! Virginia Tech and the Advanced Photon Source were nice enough to put out press rel

We are excited to announce that Grace McLaughlin will be joining our lab as a new Ph.D. student in the fall. Grace double-majored in applied math and quantitative biology in UNC, and worked for years with profs Laura Miller and Amy Gladfelter. She'll enter the Engineering Mechanics program in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. She'll also be a part of the BIOTRANS interdisciplinary graduate program. Welcome! [Update: Grace left the program in January 2019 for family re