Detlef Lohse wins prestigious George K. Batchelor Prize
Professor Detlef Lohse has been awarded the George K. Batchelor Prize. This global prize in the field of fluid dynamics is awarded once every four years by the Journal of Fluid Mechanics (Cambridge University Press) and the International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (IUTAM). Lohse is a FOM workgroup leader and a member of FOM's Executive Board. He has received the prize for his outstanding research on a wide range of fundamental fluid mechanics topics, including sonoluminescence, turbulent convection, multiphase flow and microfluid dynamics, and for technological applications. Using innovative laboratory experiments, coupled with theoretical and numerical calculations, Lohse has made significant advances that have provided a new understanding of the physics underlying these many different types of flow.
About the prize
The George K. Batchelor Prize is worth $25,000 and is intended for excellent scientists who have made a substantial contribution to fluid dynamics over the past ten years. The first prize winner in 2008 was Professor Howard Stone (then Harvard, now Princeton); Lohse is the second winner and the first European winner. The prize will be presented in August 2012 during the International Congress of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ICTAM) in Peking (China). As the winner, Lohse may also give a lecture at that congress which will subsequently be published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics and on the website of Cambridge Journals .
G.K. Batchelor was a leading figure in fluid dynamics in the second half of the twentieth century. He is best known for his groundbreaking work in the area of homogenous turbulence, turbulence diffusion and the dynamics and flow characteristics of suspensions of small particles. He founded the Department for Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge in 1959 and then led this for 24 years. He was also a co-founder and for 20 years chair of Euromech, a scientific association in the field of mechanics. And in 1956 he founded the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, which he subsequently published for 42 years.
Click here to see what Cambridge Journals writes about awarding the prize to Detlef Lohse.