US turbulence researcher: Humboldt Research Award winner comes to TU Ilmenau

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US turbulence researcher: Humboldt Research Award winner comes to TU Ilmenau
The fluid dynamics researcher Professor Katepalli Raju Sreenivasan has received the Humboldt Research Award. With the prize money of 60,000 euros, the Indian scientist, who works in the USA, can now conduct research at TU Ilmenau for up to 12 months. His host will be the head of the Fluid Mechanics Group, Prof. Jörg Schumacher, who is himself a Fellow of the American Physical Society and has received an ERC Advanced Grant, the most prestigious research funding from the European Union. Prof. Sreenivasan will be coming to Ilmenau for his first visit in October.

Every year, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation awards up to 100 Humboldt Research Awards, each endowed with 60,000 euros, to leading international scientists from all scientific disciplines. One of this year’s award winners, Prof. Katepalli Raju Sreenivasan from New York University in New York City, USA, will be using supercomputers and quantum computers to investigate turbulent convection at TU Ilmenau together with Prof. Jörg Schumacher, Head of the Fluid Mechanics Group, and scientists from the Institute for Thermoand Fluid Dynamics. In meteorology, one speaks of a mesoscale convective system when, for example, thunderstorms merge into a large thunderstorm complex that exists for several hours.

Prof. Katepalli Raju Sreenivasan is an internationally renowned expert in the field of flow turbulence. Both scientists, Prof. Sreenivasan and his Ilmenau host, Prof. Jörg Schumacher, have known each other for 25 years and have worked closely together ever since. Prof. Sreenivasan worked at Yale University at the time and Jörg Schumacher worked in his research group as a young postdoctoral researcher with a Feodor-Lynen Fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.


As a young scientist, Prof. Katepalli Raju Sreenivasan completed his doctorate in aerodynamics at the Indian Institute of Science Bengaluru. His further scientific career took him via Australia to the USA, where he held positions at Johns Hopkins University Baltimore and professorships at Yale University, the University of Maryland College Park and New York University. From 2003 to 2010, he was Abdus Salaam Research Professor and Director of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, which is supported by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Prof. Sreenivasan is being honored with the Humboldt Research Award for his groundbreaking work on the dynamics of turbulence, i.e. the turbulence of a flow, as well as on quantum turbulence and the theory of fractals in turbulence. Fractals are geometric shapes that repeat themselves from the smallest to the largest and, as already observed by Leonardo da Vinci, occur in different sizes, for example in crystal growth or as flow vortices. In his research, Sreenivasan always combined theory, experiments and large-scale numerical simulations. In recognition of the outstanding quality of his achievements, he has been awarded numerous prizes since his postdoctoral period, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and three prizes from the American Physical Society: the Otto Laporte Memorial Award, the Fluid Dynamics Prize and the Leo P. Kadanoff Prize. Prof. Sreenivasan is a member of numerous scientific institutions and academies, including the US National Academy of Sciences, the US National Academy of Engineering and the Indian National Engineering Academy.