Laxminarayan Raja

Biography

Dr. Raja is Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin. He holds the Robert L. Parker Sr. Professorship in Engineering at the Cockrell College of Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin. He has a Ph.D in Mechanical Engineering, M.S. in Nuclear Engineering, and a B. Tech in Aerospace Engineering. His PhD dissertation was in the modeling of high-pressure capillary arc discharges. Dr. Raja received the prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2001. He serves on the AIAA Plasma Dynamics and Lasers (PDL) Technical Committee and was the Technical Program Chair for the AIAA SciTech 2014 PDL meeting held in National Harbor, Washington DC in Jan 2014. He was the Secretary for the 65th Gaseous Electronics Conference of the American Physical Society held in Austin, Texas in Oct. 2012. This conference is one of the leading forums for discussions on non-thermal plasmas with a typical attendance of about 400 national and international participants.

Dr. Raja’s research is in the areas of non-thermal and thermal plasmas, chemically reactive flows, and combustion. His research emphasizes both fundamental studies of plasma phenomena and the study of plasma applications in spacecraft electric propulsion, aerodynamic flow control, combustion physics of ignition and flame stabilization with plasmas, and materials processing. The above research is conducted primarily through computational modeling involving multidimensional chemically reactive plasma models and particle models that have been developed in his research group. His group uses high-performance computing approaches to address the computational modeling problems of interest. The research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), Army Research Office (ARO), Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), and the Department of Energy (DoE). Dr. Raja has published extensively with 130 peer-reviewed journal publications and over 200 conference presentations and publications.

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