My interests broadly focus on applying techniques from engineering, particularly numerical methods, to biological problems, particularly those involving fluid dynamics. For my PhD at UC Berkeley, I worked with Profs. Mark Stacey and Mimi Koehl on the fluid mechanics of crustacean olfactory antennules, using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to simulate the flow of water around these appendages as they are flicked through the water. I then quantified the swimming behaviors of marine protists during a postdoc with Prof. Susanne Menden-Deuer at U. Rhode Island. Most recently, I have been lured across the pond to work with Prof. Stuart Humphries on the problem of why bacteria are shaped the way they are. I have developed a very accurate and efficient Boundary Element Method code to simulate arbitrarily shaped, freely swimming microorganisms, which I am currently using to simulate the motility of curved rod bacteria as well as dinoflagellates. Subject Specialism Biological Engineering and Numerical Modeling Qualifications PhD, Civil and Environmental Engineering — University of California, Berkeley, 2011 MS, Civil and Environmental Engineering — University of California, Berkeley, 2006 BS, Biological and Environmental Engineering — Cornell University, 2005

Form and function in a microbial world — Leverhulme Trust in 2013

biofluidynamics CFD fluid mechanics numerical methods scientific computing

Orchard, Michael and Humphries, Stuart and Schuech, Rudi and Menden-Deuer, Susanne (2016) The influence of viscosity on the motility and sensory ability of the dinoflagellate Heterocapsa triquetra. Journal of Plankton Research, 38 (4). pp. 1062-1076. ISSN: 0142-7873 Schuech, Rudi and Menden-Deuer, Susanne (2014) Going ballistic in the plankton: anisotropic swimming behavior of marine protists. Limnology and Oceanography: Fluids and Environments, 4 (1). pp. 1-16. ISSN: 2157-3689 Schuech, R. and Stacey, M. T. and Barad, M. F. and Koehl, M. A. R. (2012) Numerical simulations of odorant detection by biologically inspired sensor arrays. Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, 7 (1). pp. 16001. ISSN: 1748-3182 Fisher, Michael B. and Love, David C. and Schuech, Rudi and Nelson, Kara L. (2011) Simulated sunlight action spectra for inactivation of MS2 and PRD1 bacteriophages in clear water. Environmental Science & Technology, 45 (21). pp. 9249-9255. ISSN: 0013-936X