Understanding flows

Markus Holzner studies turbulence, conditions that look a lot like chaos to most people. He was fascinated by Leonardo DaVinci’s drawings of flowing water even from a young age, and had mentors who took his curiosity seriously. While working on his PhD, he observed something in his experiments that didn’t fit the conventional explanation. An observation became a scientific contradiction. The contradiction became a journey of discovery.

Today, he uses this close observation to better understand flows in a wide variety of systems: in rivers, in the ocean, in microplastics, in fish, and even in blood flow. Essentially, it’s all about the big, simple questions: What moves where? And what does that mean for life?