Rate My Professor Bruce Rodenborn

In the Rodenborn Lab, undergraduate research teams investigate robophysics of bacterial swimming using robots with helical flagella in highly viscous silicone oil to examine drag-based propulsion at low Reynolds numbers and boundary effects. Other projects calibrate numerical simulations, such as regularized Stokeslets, using experimental force and torque data from macroscopic bacterial models, and measure torque on rotating spheres and cylinders near boundaries. Rodenborn received a $260,000 National Science Foundation grant in 2022 to study bacterial swimming mechanisms, supporting undergraduate research assistants and STEM outreach. His publications include "Propulsion of microorganisms by a helical flagellum" (2013), "Observations of the stratorotational instability in rotating concentric cylinders" (Physical Review Fluids, 2016), "Using Experimentally Calibrated Regularized Stokeslets to Assess Bacterial Flagellar Motility Near a Surface" (2021), "Advancing Access to Cutting-Edge Tabletop Science" (2022), and "Using theory and experiments of spheres moving near boundaries to optimize the method of images for regularized Stokeslets" (Physical Review Fluids, 2025). His scholarship has accumulated over 395 citations.