Curriculum Vitae

• Oct 2022 - present: Postdoctoral researcher, Machine Learning Genoa Center - MaLGa & Department of Civil, Chemical and Environmental Engineering, University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy.

Advisor: Prof Agnese Seminara

• Mar 2022- May 2022: Academic visitor, International Centre for Theoretical Sciences - Tata Institute of Fundamental Research,  Bangalore, India. Experimental research at National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore

• Jul 2020- Nov 2021: Guest researcher, Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Goettingen, Germany,  Excluding  Jan - May 2021.

• Feb 2020- Jun 2020: Postdoctoral researcher, Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Goettingen, Germany

• Jul 2016- Jan 2020: Doctoral researcher, Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Goettingen, Germany

1. Martin James*, L.S*. Rogers, M. Salsman, F. Viola, N. Bellono and A. Seminara, 'Amphibian water to land transition reveals physical limits of olfaction' arXiv:2608.20765 (2026)

2. N.K. Varghese, A. Comite, Martin James, ‘Effect of ink formulation on oxygen evolution activity identified using Bayesian methods’ ChemRxiv preprint DOI:10.26434/chemrxiv.15006564 (2026)

3. F. Marcolli, Martin James and A. Seminara, ‘Noise enhances odor source localization’ arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.07445 (2026)

4. Martin James, F. Viola and A. Seminara, ‘Effect of swimming mode on shielding of odor traces in turbulence’ Phys. Rev. Research 8, 023100 (2026)

5. M. Rando, Martin James, A. Verri, L. Rosasco, A. Seminara, ‘Q-learning with temporal memory to navigate turbulence'  eLife 13:RP102906 (2025)

6. S. Mukherjee, R.K. Singh, Martin James and S.S. Ray, ‘Intermittency, fluctuations and maximal chaos in an emergent universal state of active turbulence’ Nat. Phys. (2023)

7. Martin James*, D.A. Suchla*, J. Dunkel and M. Wilczek, ‘Emergence and melting of active vortex crystals’ Nat. Commun. 12 5630 (2021)

8. S. Mukherjee, R.K. Singh, Martin James and S.S. Ray, ‘Anomalous diffusion and Levy walks distinguish active from inertial turbulence’ Phys. Rev. Lett. 127 118007 (2021) [Editor’s suggestion and Cover] (supporting information)

• Featured in Physics: [Physics 14, s116 (2021)] 'Bacteria That Shove Harder, Move Further'

9. Martin James, W.J.T. Bos and M. Wilczek, ‘Turbulence and turbulent pattern formation in a minimal model for active fluids’ Phys. Rev. Fluids 3 061101(R) (2018) (supporting information)

10. Martin James and M. Wilczek, ‘Vortex dynamics and Lagrangian statistics in a model for active turbulence’ Europ. Phys. J. E 41 21 (2018)

11. Martin James and S.S. Ray, ‘Enhanced droplet collision rates and impact velocities in turbulent flows: The effect of poly-dispersity and transient phases’ Sci. Rep. 7, 12231 (2017)

* authors contributed equally

• Jul 2016- Jan 2020: PhD in Physics, University of Goettingen, Goettingen, Germany.
  Thesis: Turbulence and pattern formation in continuum models for active matter
  Advisor: Prof Michael Wilczek

• Aug 2011- Jun 2016: BSc and MSc in Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India.
  Thesis: Collisions and coalescence amongst droplets in a turbulent flow
  Advisors: Prof Samriddhi Sankar Ray and Prof Rahul Pandit

• Italian national supercomputing consortium CINECA Class C HPC grant (2026)

• CENTURI Postdoctoral Fellowship of the Turing Centre for Living Systems [declined] (2022)

• International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS) fellowship of the Physics of Biological and Complex Systems (PBCS) school of the Max Planck Society (2016- 2019)

• Kishore Vaigyanik Protsahan Yojana (KVPY) fellowship of the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India (2011-16)

• 'The fluid mechanics of odor transport, sensing and tracking' Department of Applied Mechanics and Biomedical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India  (August 2026)

• 'Self-organization in active fluids' GranSLAM Seminar Series, Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India  (August 2026)

• 'The fluid mechanics of odor transport, sensing and tracking'  ME seminar Series, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India [virtual] (July 2026)

• ’Self-organization in active soft matter'  Friday Colloquium Series, Department of Physics, NTNU, Trondheim, Norway (March 2026)

• ’Computational fluid dynamics and reinforcement learning approaches to navigation and swarming of mesoscale swimmers in turbulence'  European Chemoreception Research Organization Meeting [symposium], Bilbao, Spain (September 2025)

• ’Self-organization in active fluids'  Environmental Microfluidics Lab, ETH Zürich, Switzerland (May 2022)

• ’Melting of self-organized vortex crystals in active matter’, Max Planck Campus Seminar, Goettingen, Germany (October 2019)

• ’Turbulence in active fluids’, Max Planck Center meeting, Mainz, Germany (January 2018)

• 'Advective stabilization of active vortex crystals' WE-Heraeus-Seminar: Nonlinear Dynamics and Emergence Across Scales: Active, Chaotic and Complex Systems, Roscoff, France (September 2026)

• 'Odor shielding in turbulence' Physics of Biological Systems Workshop, Edinburgh, UK (May 2025)

• 'Swimming mode determines how well mesoscale swimmers shield their odor in turbulence', European Fluid Dynamics Conference, Aachen, Germany (September 2024)

• 73rd Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting 2024, Lindau, Germany (July 2024)

• ‘Impact of Swimmer Dynamics on Odor Transport by Mesoscale Swimmers in Turbulent Environments', EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria (April 2024)

• Complex Lagrangian Problems of Particles in Flows, ICTS-TIFR, Bangalore, India [virtual] (March 2022)

• Third Infinity Conference 2020, Goettingen, Germany (February 2020) [Organizer]

• ‘Melting of vortex crystals in a minimal model for active fluids’, Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics, Seattle, USA (November 2019)

• ‘Dynamical phases in a model for active fluids’, Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics, Atlanta, USA (November 2018)

• ‘Pattern formation in a generalized Navier-Stokes model for active fluids’, Dynamics Days Europe, Loughborough, UK (September 2018)

• Tutored Turbulence and CFD Models course at Department of Civil, Chemical and Environmental Engineering, University of Genoa (2024)

• Tutored Turbulence Meets Active Matter Faculty of Physics, University of Göttingen (2018-19)

• Tutored Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics Faculty of Physics, University of Göttingen (2017-18)

• Tutored Scientific Computing for Physicists  Faculty of Physics, University of Göttingen (2017-18)