FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Lecture Set for 7 January During 2025 AIAA SciTech Forum
November 18, 2024 – Reston, Va. – The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) is pleased to announce the 2025 AIAA Dryden Lectureship in Research is awarded to Tim C. Lieuwen, Regents’ Professor, David S. Lewis Jr. Chair, and Executive Director of the Strategic Energy Institute at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
Lieuwen will deliver his lecture, “Future Research Directions in Aero Propulsion and Clean Energy Systems,” Tuesday, 7 January, 4 p.m. ET, during the 2025 AIAA SciTech Forum, Orlando, Florida.
2025 AIAA SciTech Forum registration is available now. Journalists can request a Press Pass here.
Lieuwen is a Regents’ Professor and the interim Executive Vice President for Research at Georgia Tech, where he provides overall leadership for its research, economic development, compliance, and commercialization units. He is also founder and CTO of TurbineLogic, an energy industry analytics firm. He is an international authority on clean energy and propulsion, and his work has contributed to numerous commercialized innovations in the energy and aerospace sectors. He has authored four books and over 500 other publications. Lieuwen serves on boards of three DOE national labs and EPRI, and is a DOE Secretary appointee to the National Petroleum Counsel. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Future aero propulsion and clean energy systems will be profoundly influenced by broader societal drivers associated with decarbonization, national security, and resilience. Lieuwen’s lecture will address these societal drivers and the underlying RD&D needs, such as system efficiencies, operational flexibility, emissions and environmental impacts, and fuel flexibility. As case studies, the lecture will highlight fundamental problems in combustion and fluid mechanics that flow out of these drivers. Many of these issues drive from the fact that combustion occurs in a high shear flow with strong density gradients, leading to important flow instabilities that often dominate fluid mixing, flame stability, interactions with acoustic waves, and system operability. Indeed, it is fair to say that understanding and controlling these interactions will be one of the key enablers – or stumbling blocks – behind realization of low carbon thermal energy systems, and next generation aircraft and rocket engines. Moreover, the dynamics and stability of reacting flows introduce fascinating physiochemical behaviors, which are fundamentally interesting in their own right. This lecture will span from fundamentals to current applications and unsolved problems at the intersection of combustion, fluid mechanics, and flow stability, and will be of interest to industry, researchers, and students.
The Dryden Lectureship in Research is one of the most prestigious lectureships bestowed by the Institute. Since the inaugural lecture in 1961, it has been a catalyst for sharing research advancements and knowledge. This premier lecture is named in honor of Dr. Hugh L. Dryden, a renowned aerospace leader and a director of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA, as well as the first deputy administrator of NASA when the agency was created in 1958. The award emphasizes the importance of basic research in advancing aeronautics and astronautics. For more information about the AIAA Honors and Awards program, contact Patricia A. Carr at [email protected].
Media Contact: Rebecca Gray, [email protected], 804-397-5270 cell
About AIAA
The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) is the world’s largest aerospace technical society. With nearly 30,000 individual members from 91 countries, and 100 corporate members, AIAA brings together industry, academia, and government to advance engineering and science in aviation, space, and defense. For more information, visit aiaa.org, or follow AIAA on X/Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.