Howard Stone
Princeton University
Seminar Information
I will provide an overview of two recent projects in my group where we identify new analytical and physical features of flows common to modern research questions. First, I will share some of our work (experimental and numerical) on fluid dynamics themes related to virus transmission by speech, which has largely been neglected, but may be relevant when thinking about asymptomatic transmission of a pathogen, e.g., what kinds of air flows and air exchanges occur when you are talking, masked or unmasked, with a colleague? Second, I consider the drainage of a liquid film on a vertical substrate of finite width. We measured experimentally the film shape near an edge, which is a function of time and two space variables. Analysis of the corresponding nonlinear thin-film equation shows that there is a similarity solution, collapsing three independent variables to one similarity variable, so that the nonlinear PDE becomes a nonlinear ODE. This novel similarity solution (three variables to one) is in excellent agreement with the experimental measurements.
Professor Howard A. Stone received the Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of California at Davis in 1982 and the PhD in Chemical Engineering from Caltech in 1988. Following a postdoctoral year in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, in 1989 he joined the faculty of the (now) School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University, where he eventually became the Vicky Joseph Professor of Engineering and Applied Mathematics. In 1994 Professor Stone received both the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Award and the Phi Beta Kappa teaching Prize, which are the only two teaching awards given to faculty in Harvard College. In 2000 he was named a Harvard College Professor for his contributions to undergraduate education. In July 2009 he moved to Princeton University where he is Donald R. Dixon ’69 and Elizabeth W. Dixon Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.
Professor Stone's research interests are in fluid dynamics, especially as they arise in research and applications at the interface of engineering, chemistry, physics, and biology. In particular, he developed original research directions, using experiments, theory, and simulations, in microfluidics, multiphase flows, electrokinetics, flows involving bacteria and biofilms, etc. He received the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), and is past Chair of the Division of Fluid Dynamics of the APS. For ten years he served as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and is currently on the editorial or advisory boards of Physical Review Fluids, Langmuir, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and Soft Matter, and is co-editor of the Soft Matter Book Series. Professor Stone is the first recipient of the G.K. Batchelor Prize in Fluid Dynamics, which was awarded in August 2008, and the 2016 recipient of the Fluid Dynamics Prize of the APS. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2009, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011, and the National Academy of Sciences in 2014.