[5] In 1997, Attinger received his combined Bachelors and master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland.
[9] In 2018, he filed a Federal lawsuit, claiming that the enforcement of vague university rules on faculty behavior was violating academic freedom and constitutional right to free speech.
According the settlement, Attinger was allowed to hire staff to assist him in his laboratory, and may pursue his research activities until mid-2021, when he will resign from Iowa State University.
The stochastic-automata model developed with colleagues Clausse and Marcel was two orders of magnitude faster than current numerical methods at simulating pool boiling.
[14] With colleague De Brabanter and co-authors, Attinger proposed a method to reconstruct the area of origin of blood spatter patterns considering fluid dynamics and statistical uncertainties.
Their model accounts for the curvature of the drop trajectories due to gravity and drag, and provides solutions with an uncertainty specific to the spatter pattern at hand[15] With colleague De Brabanter and Ph.D. student Liu, Attinger explored the capabilities of artificial intelligence to assist in crime scene reconstruction.
[16] Attinger and colleagues published two open source databases of bloodstain patterns, scanned in high resolution and freely available for research or teaching purposes.
[17][18] Attinger used Newton's equation of motion along with other models for gravity and drag forces for the screening of five parameters including drop size, initial velocity and the launch angle.
He then conducted fluid dynamics simulations based on the selected parameters and presented the results in the form of charts for the purpose of crime scene reconstruction.
[21] Applications of their research are in enhanced mixing of reagents and in the generation of drops and bubbles on-demand,[22] with controlled timing and sizes, from nanoliter to picoliter.
With colleague Yarin and Ph.D. student Comiskey, Attinger proposed a theoretical model that predicts forward blood spatter patterns caused by bullet wound.