John Dabiri Unlocks the Mysteries of Jellyfish

While an undergraduate at Princeton, John Dabiri spent a summer at the California Institute of Technology, filming jellyfish at a nearby aquarium and trying to write mathematical models to describe their movement. “Initially I hated the idea, because my opinion of biology was that it was all memorization and stamp-collecting,” Dabiri says. “But it became clear that the jellyfish had a lot to teach me.”

After graduating with degrees in mechanical and aerospace engineering, he headed to Caltech for good. Dabiri earned his Ph.D. there in 2005 and became a tenured professor before age 30. Along the way, Dabiri, now 32, unraveled some of the mysteries of the jellyfish and how they propel themselves by creating whirling vortexes in the water. The U.S. Navy is funding development of underwater craft that employ his mathematical models to move using 30 percent less energy than existing options.