Museum of Science
As an educator at the Museum of Science, Boston, Brendan brought physics and climate science to schools, libraries, and camps throughout New England. Especially if you live in eastern Massachusetts, chances are that he visited your town with a program! Within the Museum, Brendan was privileged to be among the elite few who are able to use the world’s largest air-insulated Van de Graaff generator.
You can find some articles about his outreach work for the museum below. There’s a subtle theme in the pictures.
Research
Brendan also conducted fluid dynamics research with Professor Greg Voth at Wesleyan University. In the course of this research, he designed and fabricated “particles”—jack-like shapes made out of straight rods connected by a common center—to be shaken around in a giant tank in order to learn about the properties of turbulent fluid flows.
The primary place to find this research is in his master’s thesis:
Size-Dependence of Rotation Rates of Spheres and Disks in Turbulence
Brendan Cole, Wesleyan University, 2016.
More details about the methods used can be found in:
Methods for Measuring the Orientation and Rotation Rate of 3D-printed Particles in Turbulence
Brendan C. Cole, Guy G. Marcus, Shima Parsa, Stefan Kramel, Rui Ni, Greg A. Voth, Journal of Visualized Experiments, 112, e53599 (2016).
Brendan Cole 