Jeffrey Moehlis

Associate Professor

Mechanical Engineering

Jeffrey Moehlis

Contacts

UCSB Department of Mechanical Engineering
Engineering II Building, Room 2350
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-5070

tel: (805) 893-7513
fax: (805) 893-8651
moehlis@engineering.ucsb.edu

Personal web site

Research Description

Biological Dynamics - response dynamics of neural populations - natural and artificial swarms: schooling fish, flocking birds, etc - territorial behavior Fluid Dynamics - shear flow turbulence, especially low-dimensional models Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) - theoretical analysis of individual and coupled MEMS devices Dynamical Systems - bifurcation theory, especially for systems with symmetry and effect of forced symmetry breaking - canards

Biography

Professor Moehlis received his Ph.D. in Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and then was a postdoctoral researcher in the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University. He joined the UCSB Mechanical Engineering faculty in 2003. His research interests include applying dynamical systems techniques to understand the response dynamics of neural populations, the dynamics of natural and artifical swarms, the nature of shear flow turbulence, and the dynamics of individual and coupled MEMS devices.


Awards/Honors

  • National Science Foundation CAREER Award, 2006-2011
  • Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Mathematics, 2005-2007
  • University of California at Santa Barbara Regents’ Junior Faculty Fellowship, 2004
  • National Science Foundation Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Princeton University, 2000
  • Bernard Friedman Memorial Prize in Applied Mathematics for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1999
  • Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Fellowship at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 1999
  • Department of Education Fellowship, University of California, Berkeley, 1995, 1998

Selected Publications

See complete list of publications
  • Canards for a reduction of the Hodgkin-Huxley equations, Journal of Mathematical Biology, 52, 2006, 141-153, J. Moehlis, web link
  • Optimal inputs for phase models of spiking neurons, ASME Journal of Computational and Nonlinear Dynamics, 1, 2006, 358-367, J. Moehlis, E. Shea-Brown, H. Rabitz, web link
  • Heteroclinic cycles and periodic orbits for the O(2)-equivariant 0:1:2 mode interaction, Physica D, 211, 2005, 347-376, J. Moehlis, T.R. Smith and P. Holmes, web link
  • Low-dimensional modelling of turbulence using the proper orthogonal decomposition: A tutorial, Nonlinear Dynamics, 41, 2005, 275-307, J. Moehlis, T.R. Smith and P. Holmes, web link
  • Low-dimensional models for turbulent plane Couette flow in a minimal flow unit, Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 538, 2005, 71-110, J. Moehlis, T.R. Smith and P. Holmes, web link
  • Optimal decisions: from neural spikes, through stochastic differential equations, to behavior, IEICE Trans. Fundamentals, E88-A, 2005, 2496-2503, J. Moehlis, P. Holmes, E. Shea-Brown, R. Bogacz, J. Gao, G. Aston-Jones, E. Clayton, J. Rajkowski, and J.D. Cohen, web link
  • Periodic orbits and chaotic sets in a low-dimensional model for shear flows, SIAM Journal on Applied Dynamical Systems, 4, 2005, 352-376, J. Moehlis, H. Faisst and B. Eckhardt, web link
  • A low-dimensional model for turbulent shear flows, New Journal of Physics, 6, 2004, Article No. 56, J. Moehlis, H. Faisst and B. Eckhardt, web link
  • On the phase reduction and response dynamics of neural oscillator populations, Neural Computation, 16, 2004, 673-715, J. Moehlis, E. Brown and P. Holmes, web link
  • The influence of spike rate and stimulus duration on noradrenergic neurons, Journal of Computational Neuroscience, 17, 2004, 13-29, J. Moehlis, E. Brown, P. Holmes, E. Clayton, J. Rajkowski, and G. Aston-Jones, web link