Prize Recipient

Ronald J. Adrian
Arizona State University

Citation:

"For his advancement of experimental techniques and their integration into experiments that have led to new insight into complex flows."

Background:

Ronald J. Adrian was educated at the University of Minnesota (B.M.E. 1967, M.S. 1969) and at the University of Cambridge Cavendish Laboratory, where he received his Ph.D. degree in physics in 1972. He joined the faculty of the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1972, where he became the Leonard C. and Mary Lou Hoeft Chair of Engineering in 1997. In 2005 he became the Ira A. Fulton Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Arizona State University-Tempe and the Director of the Laboratory for Energetic Flow and Turbulence.

His research interests are the space-time structure of turbulent fluid motion, especially wall turbulence and thermal convection, and the development of techniques, both experimental and analytical, to explore these structures. Methods to which he has made fundamental contributions are the laser Doppler velocimeter technique, particle image velocimetry and the stochastic estimation method.

He co-edited Experiments in Fluids, and a twelve volume series on Laser Techniques in Fluid Mechanics. Currently, he serves as an Associate Editor of J. Fluid Mechanics . He is a Fellow of the APS, the American Academy of Mechanics, the ASME, and a member of the United States National Academy of Engineering. Recently, he received the Nusselt-Reynolds Prize for 2001 for experimental research in fluid mechanics and the AIAA Award in Measurement Technology for 2002.

Selection Committee:

Marvin Goldstein (Chair), Ann Karagozian 12/05, Bud Homsy ('04 Rcpnt)(12/05), Joel Koplik (V. Chair)(12/06), Patrick Huerre (12/06), Philip Morrison (12/06), Tony Maxworthy (12/06)