Daniele Agostinelli received the AIMETA "Meccanica dei Materiali" award for his doctoral thesis directed by Antonio De Simone and Giovanni Noselli, titled "Mathematical models for biological motility: From peristaltic crawling to plant nutations".
The fascinating thesis work focuses on mathematical modelling of two types of biological motility: peristalsis, used by organisms ranging from earthworms to the unicellular alga Euglena, and circumnutations, a circular and oscillatory movement typical of plants, barely perceptible to the human eye due to its slowness.
An accessible explanation of the work, written by the same author, is available on the medium blog of SISSA MATHLAB.
The award, conferred by AIMETA, the Italian Association of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, is given every year to the best thesis in the fields of Biomechanics, Computational Mechanics and Material Mechanics.
Image from D. Agostinelli, A. DeSimone, and G. Noselli. Nutations in plant shoots: Endogenous and exogenous factors in the presence of mechanical deformations. bioRxiv, 2020 - CC-BY-NC