Prize Recipient

William Durham
University of Oxford

Citation:

"For innovative work at the interface of fluid mechanics and environmental science, and specifically for demonstrating through a combination of original experiments and modeling that hydrodynamic effects can have a major impact on the spatial distribution of motile plankton in the ocean"

Background:

William ‘Mack’ Durham graduated with a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Clemson University in 2004 and then moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for graduate work, receiving a S.M. in 2006 from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering with a thesis titled ‘The effect of fluid acceleration on sediment transport in the surf zone’.  He was awarded a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship to pursue Ph.D. work with Prof. Roman Stocker, which was completed in 2011 with a thesis titled ‘Phytoplankton in Flow.’ Mack has won a number of prizes, including the Raymond L. Lindeman award from the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography and the Milton Van Dyke award from the American Physical Society. He is currently a Departmental Research Lecturer in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford.  Mack’s current work aims to resolve how fluid flow shapes the ecology and evolution of microorganisms.