Dr. Shane Ross and the Ross Dynamics Lab - Brief description and bio The Ross Dynamics Lab at Virginia Tech specializes in applications of nonlinear dynamics, performing data-driven modeling, simulation, visualization, and experiments with applications in several different fields, including: patterns of dispersal in oceanic and atmospheric flows, passive and active aerodynamic gliding, dynamic buckling of flexible structures, transport across the airwater interface, orbital mechanics, chemical physics, and causality analysis in complex natural and artificial systems. Dr. Ross is a professor of dynamical systems and fluid dynamics at Virginia Tech in the Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering. Dr. Ross has advanced the state-of-the-art in the analysis and visualization of environmental transport. He initiated the use of atmospheric transport barriers in understanding the biological invasion of microorganisms, particularly plant diseases of agricultural crops. He has done field work and Lagrangian transport computations analyzing the dispersal of hazardous material in aquatic environments, including lakes and oceans, with side applications to spread of debris and persons in search-and-rescue scenarios. Dr. Ross’ work on orbital dynamics initiated the use of dynamical systems methods for mission design among the international astrodynamics community, particularly invariant manifold theory, and has received several awards from NASA. He co-authored an open-access book on the subject, Dynamical Systems, the Three-Body Problem, and Space Mission Design. Dr. Ross founded an interdisciplinary graduate education program on biological transport (called Biotrans) that began in 2010 and has now cross-trained over 25 PhD students at the engineeringbiology interface. He helped shepherd the program’s transition to sustained internal funding, contributing to an infrastructure of interdisciplinary discovery at the intersection of engineering and biology which will have impacts for years to come. He is author of more than 150 publications, including 80 journal articles (5,500 citations, h-index of 36). He has spoken to thousands of people at dozens of universities worldwide including MIT, Caltech, Stanford, Princeton, Cornell, UCLA, UCSB, Duke, Michigan, Maryland, Texas A&M, UNC Chapel Hill, TU Munich, Toronto, Warwick, ETH Zurich, Leiden, Madrid, and Barcelona, and at several prestigious international forums, including the British Science Festival and the Zurich Physics Colloquium. His research has been featured in the pages of Nature, Science, Scientific American, New Scientist, Science News, American Scientist, Astronomy, the Times of London, the BBC, and several other international news outlets, including those in India, Russia, Finland, Poland, Turkey, Brazil, and China. He has obtained externally sponsored research projects totaling $14 million, including a prestigious NSF CAREER award. He has supervised 14 PhD and 3 MS students to the completion of their degrees, all of whom have gone on to positions in industry, government, or academia (3 are now professors). He is currently supervising 6 more PhD and MS students He has a bachelor’s degree in physics and a PhD in control and dynamical systems, both from Caltech (California Institute of Technology). He has worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) and Boeing.