John Dabiri studies motion.

Not motion in the abstract, but the strange, beautiful physics of how living things move through the world. Jellyfish pulsing through seawater. Fish swimming in schools. Blood curling through the chambers of the human heart. Wind passing through turbines.

Dabiri is Caltech’s Centennial Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering, and one of the leading researchers in fluid dynamics. His work sits in that fertile territory where biology and engineering begin borrowing ideas from each other.

Early in his career, he began studying jellyfish because their movement seemed simple enough to understand. It wasn’t. He discovered that their slow pulsing produces remarkably efficient vortex rings in the water. That work eventually helped illuminate fluid motion in the heart, inspired new approaches to underwater propulsion, and led his lab to develop tiny electronic devices that can guide living jellyfish through the ocean as potential environmental sensors.

Then came fish.

Dabiri wondered if the way fish arrange themselves in schools might contain clues for harvesting wind energy. His group found that turbines arranged to take advantage of the swirling wakes created by neighboring turbines could dramatically improve how much energy could be generated from a given piece of land. Nature had already spent millions of years experimenting with fluid dynamics. Dabiri was paying attention.

In 2025, he received the National Medal of Science, the nation’s highest scientific honor. He is also a MacArthur Fellow and recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award. His current research continues across biological fluid dynamics, next generation wind energy, and new ways of measuring complex flows.

I photographed John at Caltech in September 2026.

There is something I love about scientists whose work changes the way you look at ordinary things. After spending time with John, a jellyfish is no longer just drifting. A school of fish is no longer just a school of fish. Even the invisible air moving around us begins to feel like something worth watching.

That may be one of science’s great gifts.

Learning to see what was there all along.