Ankur Gupta

Patterns on a tropical fish might not seem like a chemistry problem, but Ankur Gupta has a knack for seeing—and describing—how the rules of physical chemistry explain the world around us. By accounting for the way particles move in a chemical gradient—a phenomenon known as diffusiophoresis—the University of Colorado Boulder chemical engineer and his colleague Ben Alessio improved a model that mathematician Alan Turing developed to explain patterns in nature, such as the shape of a zebra’s stripes or the spacing of a jellyfish’s tentacles. Gupta’s work on diffusiophoresis was part of his postdoctoral research with chemical engineer Howard Stone of Princeton University. Stone’s group has been exploring diffusiophoresis as a way to make clean water. In animal patterns, diffusiophoresis better accounts for sharp lines than Turing’s model did. Gupta is still thinking about where he might go with it.The Turing patterns prompted Gupta to look for diffusiophoresis everywhere there are concentration gradients—and concentration gradients are everywhere in biology. Having considered diffusiophoresis across groups of cells in the Turing pattern work, Gupta is now thinking about gradients around individual cells. It’s possible that diffusiophoresis could help get drug molecules where they need to go, for instance.The work on Turing patterns is not the main focus of Gupta’s lab, although it does look pretty. (Gupta has been thinking more about the way he presents his work, whose mathematical foundations can make for dry descriptions.) Broadly, his team uses mathematical equations to study how chemicals move. Most recently, the group explained the