Troy Shinbrot

Troy Shinbrot is a professor in the Department of biomedical Engineering at Rutgers University. His research in the Biomedical lab deals with two problems: (1) in silico analysis of brain and spinal cord injury and repair and (2) granular flow and mixing.

In neuronal injury, we use genetic algorithms to simulate learning in distributed neuronal networks. We subsequently damage the networks and analyze repair strategies for comparison with data from in vitro multi-electrode array cultures. In granular problems, we study how grains spontaneously separate due to size, density, or electrostatic differences.

We have recently been focusing on investigating how voltage differences arise spontaneously in earthquake lightning and in sandstorm electrical discharges. We have reproduced parts of these bizarre effects in both laboratory experiments and in computational simulations, and we are analyzing data to determine the root causes of these effects.