People

Bhargav Rallabandi

Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering
University of California, Riverside

Bhargav Rallabandi combines mathematical modeling and experiments to understand and design complex flowing systems. Bhargav received a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2010 from the National Institute of Technology Karnataka. He received an MS (in 2012) and a PhD (in 2015) in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studying flows created by oscillating microbubbles. He then joined Princeton University as a postdoctoral researcher, where he worked on a range of problems involving hydrodynamics in soft systems. Bhargav joined UC Riverside in 2018, where he is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering.

Jake Minten

PhD Student
Research: Hydrodynamics of rough particles

Jake Minten is a PhD student in Mechanical Engineering. He currently works on theory and numerical simulations of fluid flows around interacting particulate suspensions.

Kritik Saxena

PhD Student
Research: Inertial microscale flows

Kritik Saxena is a Ph.D. student in Mechanical Engineering. He holds an MS from Louisiana Tech University, where his research was centered on learning the effects of surfactants on wettability. Before this, he was a Junior Research Fellow at the Indian Institute of Technology Dhanbad (ISM), India, where he worked on Ni-based superalloys in collaboration with the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). He holds an M. Tech. from the National Institute of Technology Calicut, where he worked on additive manufacturing of brachytherapy applicators for cancer treatment. He received his bachelor’s degree from RGPV University in Mechanical Engineering.

Tushti Thakur

PhD Student
Research: Fluid-elastic interactions

Tushti Thakur is a PhD student in Mechanical Engineering at UCR. She received her bachelor’s degree from Jadavpur University, India, working on computational modeling and machine learning. Outside research, she enjoys the quest of exploring and learning new things, and playing sports, especially badminton

Eleazer Tan

Undergraduate Student

Eleazer Tan is an undergraduate student in Mechanical Engineering. He is currently working on oscillation-driven erosion dynamics in fluids.

Xiaokang Zhang

PhD, 2026
Thesis: Particle Hydrodynamics in Oscillatory Flows: From Single Particles to Collective Pattern Formation
Next: Postdoc., University of Washington