Rajat Mittal, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at George Washington University, is conducting research to find out how top swimmers such as Natalie Coughlin, who Aug. 16 won the gold medal in the 100-meter backstroke event at the Olympics in Athens, swim so fast. Mittal, whose area of expertise is computational fluid dynamics, is director of the Flow Simulation and Analysis Group at GWU, which is currently doing research in computational fluid dynamics funded by the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and NASA.