5/1/2017
MechSE Professor and Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering Jonathan Freund was honored at a university-wide banquet Tuesday night with the Campus Excellence in Faculty Mentoring
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The award recognizes a faculty member who has demonstrated an outstanding commitment to faculty mentoring by actively assisting pre-tenure and mid-career faculty in developing their careers. Freund won the award for his efforts to guide many junior faculty – from both MechSE and the Department of Aerospace Engineering – in navigating the challenges as they adjust to the new stage of their careers.
“Professor Freund offers his expertise and insight as a tenured professor in tangible ways that have real and immediate impact,” said MechSE Department Head Tony Jacobi. “Several of his mentees have won major, competitive funding awards under his guidance, which can often set the trajectory of a young professor’s career and help ensure their path to successful tenure. This is the type of significance great mentoring can have on our early-career faculty.”
Freund holds a joint appointment in the AE department. His research is primarily in the field of fluid mechanics. Early in his career, he analyzed compressible turbulence, which has led to a series of investigations, mostly simulation-based, on the mechanics and control of jet noise. More recently, Freund has studied the dynamics of atomically thin liquid films, blood flow in the microcirculation, the mechanics of tissue injury by strong pressure waves, and statistical methods for rheological model selection. Outside of fluid mechanics, he has studied the mechanics of thermal transport in nanostructured semiconductors and the atomic detail of ion bombardment.
He is the co-director of XPACC, the Center for Exascale Simulation of Plasma-Coupled Combustion, which is funded through a $20M grant from the U.S. Department of Energy and seeks to leverage massive-scale simulation for predictive science that will advance combustion technology. He also serves as an associate editor of Physical Review Fluids and sits on the editorial board of the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics.