Howard Stone, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair Dept of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Princeton University

Friday, Mar 25th at 3pm
Sid & Marian Green Classroom (3550 MEK)

ABSTRACT: I will provide an overview of recent projects in my group where we identify new analytical and physical features of flows common to modern research questions. First, I will give a glimpse into fluid mechanics themes that I think convey some of the fascinating features of the discipline. Then I will provide three short stories starting with the drainage of a liquid film on a vertical substrate of finite width. Using experiments and mathematical models I describe how this problem admits an unusual similarity solution that explains all of the time and space dependent features we measure. Third, I present results of bacterial growth in porous media, where production of a biosurfactant leads to flow in corners, which helps to rationalize our results on bacterial spreading (even for not motile bacteria) in unsaturated porous media. Finally, I will summarize our first steps using lab-scale experiments to learn more about storage of carbon in soils, including revealing the spatiotemporal dynamics of carbon sorption and release within clay aggregates and the role of enzymatic decomposition by directly imaging a transparent smectite clay on a microfluidic chip. We show that the physically-protected carbon can be enzymatically broken down into fragments that are released into solution, which allows us to suggest improvements relevant to models of soil carbon.

BIO: Professor Howard Stone received the B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering from UC Davis in 1982 and the PhD in Chemical Engineering from Caltech in 1988. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge, in 1989 Howard 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 July 2009 Howard 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. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), and is past Chair of the Division of Fluid Dynamics of the APS. Currently he is on the editorial or advisory boards of Physical Review Fluids, Langmuir, and Soft Matter, and is co-editor of the Soft Matter Book Series. He is the first recipient of the G.K. Batchelor Prize in Fluid Dynamics (2008) and received the Fluid Dynamics Prize of the APS.(2016). 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.