Rate My Professor Bruce Rodenborn

Bruce Rodenborn is an associate professor of physics at Centre College, joining the faculty in 2014 and currently serving as chair of the Physics and Chemical Physics Programs. He received a B.A. in psychology from the University of Missouri, a B.S. in physics from the University of Missouri–St. Louis, and B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from the University of Texas at Austin. In 2020, Centre College awarded him tenure. Rodenborn is an experimental physicist whose professional interests center on fluid dynamics and nonlinear dynamics. He employs scaled laboratory experiments to study instabilities and fluid flow in geophysical systems, including the ocean and protoplanetary disks. Additionally, his research explores the fluid dynamics of small swimmers such as bacteria through macroscopic laboratory models and robophysics.

In the Rodenborn Lab, undergraduate research teams investigate robophysics of bacterial swimming using robots with helical flagella in highly viscous silicone oil to examine drag-based propulsion at low Reynolds numbers and boundary effects. Other projects calibrate numerical simulations, such as regularized Stokeslets, using experimental force and torque data from macroscopic bacterial models, and measure torque on rotating spheres and cylinders near boundaries. Rodenborn received a $260,000 National Science Foundation grant in 2022 to study bacterial swimming mechanisms, supporting undergraduate research assistants and STEM outreach. His publications include "Propulsion of microorganisms by a helical flagellum" (2013), "Observations of the stratorotational instability in rotating concentric cylinders" (Physical Review Fluids, 2016), "Using Experimentally Calibrated Regularized Stokeslets to Assess Bacterial Flagellar Motility Near a Surface" (2021), "Advancing Access to Cutting-Edge Tabletop Science" (2022), and "Using theory and experiments of spheres moving near boundaries to optimize the method of images for regularized Stokeslets" (Physical Review Fluids, 2025). His scholarship has accumulated over 395 citations.