Matalon wins prestigious Gold Medal from Combustion Institute

Moshe Matalon was honored with the 2020 Ya. B. Zeldovich Gold Medal from The Combustion Institute.

The Gold Medal is the institute’s most prestigious and is bestowed biannually to scientists whose major contributions have significantly advanced their fields of combustion science. Matalon was awarded for his lifetime achievements in the field of combustion science. He was one of just four selected from the institute’s 6,000 members worldwide.

“I am deeply honored to receive this prestigious award. I would like to thank those who nominated and supported me, as well as the selection committee and the CI for recognizing my accomplishments to Combustion Science. I am particularly gracious to my colleagues, students and collaborators who over the years have been a source of inspiration and with whom I shared many hours of excitement in search of new discoveries and explorations; they all deserve a share of this recognition,” Matalon said.

A Caterpillar Distinguished Professor, Matalon has made seminal contributions to numerous areas of combustion science including the derivation and formulation of a hydrodynamic theory of premixed flames, a general description of the reaction zone structure of diffusion flames, studies of flame instabilities (linear and nonlinear) in various configurations, contributions to liquid droplet and solid particle combustion, understanding combustion at the microscale, and theories of turbulent flames in the flamelet regime of turbulent combustion. Matalon earned his PhD in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Cornell University in 1977.

In 2018, he was elected to The Combustion Institute’s inaugural class of Fellows.