On November 1, 2025, Timo Koch began his tenure as an junior professor of “Hydromechanics” at the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering and at the Stuttgart Center for Simulation Science (SC SimTech). On Monday, October 12, 2026, he will give his inaugural lecture:
Date: Monday, 12 October 2026
Time: 4:00 pm
Title: "From capillaries to cilia — Hydromechanics of thin things in soft and porous media"
Location: Simtech Seminar Room, Pfaffenwaldring 5a, 70569 Stuttgart
Timo Koch studied “Environmental Engineering” and earned his doctoral degree at the University of Stuttgart. After a brief stint as a postdoctoral researcher, he accepted a position as a Scientia II Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Oslo in 2020. In 2025, he moved to a position as a Project Researcher on the ERC project “aCleanBrain” at the Simula Research Laboratory in Oslo. That same year, he accepted an offer for an juniorprofessorship in the Division of Hydromechanics at the University of Stuttgart.
Timo Koch’s research interests focus on transport in porous media, mathematical modeling of biological and ecological systems, and numerical algorithms for partial differential equations. In addition, he is dedicated to the development of open-source research software, particularly the DuMux framework.
Abstract
Most of what matters in a tissue or a soil happens across the surface of thin things — a capillary wall, a root, a beating cilium — and those surfaces are often too fine and too numerous to resolve explicitly in a model. So we simplify: a structure becomes a network of segments that drives the medium around it and, in turn, is driven by it. However, we simplify only the geometry; we don't simplify the exchange between network and bulk, which we work out on paper beforehand and build into a numerical method. This lecture follows a single idea through several applications and asks what a line can, and cannot, represent.