Professor Beverley J. McKeon

Beverley J. McKeon is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford. Previously she was the Theodore von Karman Professor of Aeronautics at the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories at Caltech (GALCIT) and former Deputy Chair of the Division of Engineering & Applied Science. She received her B.A., M.A. and M.Eng. from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University. She completed postdoctoral research and a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship at Imperial College London. McKeon’s research interests include interdisciplinary, equation- and data-driven approaches to modeling and manipulation of unsteady and turbulent flows across a range of Mach number, fundamental experimental investigations of wall turbulence under engineering-relevant conditions, and innovative experiments to characterize and modify unsteady and turbulent flows. Best known for her work pioneering resolvent analysis as an equation-driven tool to analyze and predict the dynamics of turbulent flow, her research group has specialized in addressing its application to understand and modify wall turbulence in numerical data and via experiments with external forcing. Prof. McKeon is a Fellow of the APS and the AIAA and the recipient of a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship from the DoD in 2017, the Presidential Early Career Award (PECASE) in 2009 and an NSF CAREER Award in 2008 as well as Caltech’s Shair Program Diversity Award, Graduate Student Council Excellence in Mentoring Award and Northrop Grumman Prize for Excellence in Teaching. She currently serves as co-Lead Editor of Physical Review Fluids and on the editorial board of the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics.

Abstract:

The last decade has seen a dramatic improvement in sophisticated techniques for the prediction of turbulent flows, driven by the generation of a range of high quality experimental and numerical datasets and techniques by which to analyze them. In this talk, I will discuss simple, cost-efficient techniques to obtain key characteristics of compressible turbulent flows, their similarities and differences to incompressible ones and their importance for high-speed wind tunnel testing, and a predictive tool for turbulent wall flows modified by generic surface roughness.