Plenary Speakers

FEDSM 2021 is proud to announce this year's plenary speakers:

 

Biographies

Prof. Howard A. Stone
Professor Howard A. Stone received the Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of California at Davis in 1982 and the PhD in Chemical Engineering from Caltech in 1988. Following a postdoctoral year in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, in 1989 he 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 1994 Professor Stone received both the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Award and the Phi Beta Kappa teaching Prize, which are the only two teaching awards given to faculty in Harvard College. In 2000 he was named a Harvard College Professor for his contributions to undergraduate education. In July 2009 he moved to Princeton University where he is Donald R. Dixon ’69 and Elizabeth W. Dixon Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Presently he is the Chair of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and in 2017 he received the Presidential Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton.

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. In particular, he developed original research directions in microfluidics including studies and applications involving bubbles and droplets, bacteria, chemical kinetics, etc. He received the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), and is past Chair of the Division of Fluid Dynamics of the APS. For ten years he served as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and is currently on the editorial or advisory boards of Physical Review Fluids, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and Soft Matter, and is co-editor of the Soft Matter Book Series. Professor Stone is the first recipient of the G.K. Batchelor Prize in Fluid Dynamics, which was awarded in August 2008. 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.

Dr. Rajat Mittal
Rajat Mittal is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) with a secondary appointment in the School of Medicine. He received the B. Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur in 1989, and the Ph.D. degree in Applied Mechanics from The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in 1995. His research interests include fluid mechanics, computing, biomedical engineering, biofluids and flow control. He is associate editor of the Journal of Computational Physics and Frontiers of Computational Physiology and Medicine, and on the editorial board of The Journal of Experimental Biology, and the International Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering.

Dr. Steven Ceccio
Steven L. Ceccio is the Vincent T. and Gloria M. Gorguze Professor of Engineering and the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs of the University of Michigan College of Engineering. He received his B. S. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan in 1985, and his M. S. and Ph. D. degrees in 1986 and 1990 in mechanical engineering from CALTECH. He became an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering at UM in 1990, Associate Professor with tenure in 1996, and Professor in 2003. He served as an Associate Vice President for Research at the University of Michigan from 2004 to 2009 and as the Director of the Naval Engineering Education Center from 2010 to 2015. He was the Chair of the Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering at the University of Michigan from 2011 to 2016. He served as the Associate Dean for Research of the College of Engineering from 2017 to 2020. He has served as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Fluids Engineering. Prof. Ceccio is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and of the American Physical Society, and he was named the 2014 Freeman Scholar by ASME

Robert J. Visintainer
Robert has worked in the design, testing and manufacture of centrifugal pumps since 1981. As Vice President of Engineering and R&D for international slurry pump manufacturer GIW Industries, he is responsible for product design, product management, materials development, hydraulic R&D, technical training and GIW’s unique Slurry Hydraulic Test Lab. He also serves as the engineering lead for product development and management within the KSB Global Mining organization. Robert has contributed to many developments and innovations in slurry pump design and the modelling of concentrated solid-liquid flows. These have included industry leading, two-phase, CFD models for pump wear prediction, experimental methods for measuring solid-liquid flows within pumps and pipelines, models for predicting their performance, wear mechanism research for materials development, and centrifugal pump theory for viscous slurries and the handling three-phase solid-liquid-gas mixtures. He has contributed to more than 100 pump designs installed world-wide in the mining and dredging industries, and to numerous scientific conferences, journals and industry short courses.

Robert has a special interest in developing the next generation of pump engineers, and is responsible for GIW’s Technical Training Program, including the well known course for "Slurry Transport using Centrifugal Pumps", now in its 44th year.