Philip Varghese

Biography

Prof. Varghese obtained his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University. He holds the Ernest H. Cockrell Centennial Chair in Engineering, served as the ASE-EM Department Chair from 2009 to 2012, and has been the Director of the Center for Aeromechanics Research since 1999. He has an international reputation in the area of combustion diagnostics and non-equilibrium flows. He was Fulbright Senior Scholar in France in 1993 and was awarded the Boeing-A.D. Welliver Faculty Fellowship by the Boeing Company. He received the Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company Award for Excellence in Engineering Teaching in Spring 2003, and was elected to the Academy of Distinguished Teachers at the University of Texas in 2005. In February 2012 he was selected Professor of the Year by the Senate of College Councils and was awarded The University of Texas System Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award in August 2016.

His research focuses on understanding the basic molecular processes occurring in high speed and high temperature, and non-equilibrium flows. This is an inter-disciplinary field, requiring a synthesis of physics and chemistry with the more traditional engineering disciplines of fluid mechanics, heat transfer, and thermodynamics. He applies his work to the study of hypersonic and rarefied flows, plasmas, and combustion. He has established a laser diagnostics laboratory for experimental studies in combustion and plasma discharges. He has an active program in planetary scale simulations of rarefied flows and has developed a novel technique for accurate solutions of the Boltzmann equation using quasi-particle simulation. He is co-inventor on six US patents related to applications of Raman spectroscopy.

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