Associate Professor Kenneth ChristensenAssociate Professor Kenneth Christensen has been named a recipient of the 2012 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research.
This prestigious award is made annually to four associate professors in the College of Engineering, in recognition of their outstanding research conducted over the past five years. Christensen will receive the award at the Engineering Faculty Awards Convocation Ceremony on April 23.
Written by By William Bowman
Associate Professor Kenneth Christensen
Associate Professor Kenneth Christensen has been named a recipient of the 2012 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research.
This prestigious award is made annually to four associate professors in the College of Engineering, in recognition of their outstanding research conducted over the past five years. Christensen will receive the award at the Engineering Faculty Awards Convocation Ceremony on April 23.
“Professor Christensen is one of the leading experimental fluid mechanicians of his generation,” MechSE Department Head Placid Ferriera said. “He has not only made seminal contributions to the development of PIV (particle image velocimetry), but has also used it to resolve long standing problems in fluid mechanics (for example, rough wall turbulence).”
Christensen, a Kritzer Faculty Scholar, conducts fundamental experimental research in a variety of areas of fluid mechanics and is director of the Laboratory for Turbulence and Complex Flow. His research on rough-wall turbulence was highlighted in the December 2010 issue of Aerospace AmericaYear in Review. He was also honored in 2011 with the Francois Frenkiel Award for Fluid Mechanics by the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics and with an Arnold O. Beckman Research Award from the University of Illinois.
Christensen joined the University of Illinois in 2004, serving first on the TAM faculty and then joining MechSE when the departments merged in 2006. He received his PhD in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Illinois in 2001, after completing his MS in Mechanical Engineering at Cal Tech and his BS in Mechanical Engineering at the University of New Mexico.