By Beth Miller
Ramesh K. Agarwal, PhD, the William Palm Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, has received the 2015 Reed Aeronautics Award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).
The award is the highest honor an individual can received for notable achievement in aeronautics. He will receive it May 6 in Washington, D.C.
The award is named after Sylvanus A. Reed, an aeronautical engineer, designer and founding member of the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences in 1932, which later became the AIAA. Reed was the first to develop a propeller system composed of metal rather than wood. His aluminum alloy propeller gave Jimmy Doolittle's plane the speed it needed to win the 1925 Schneider Cup race.
Agarwal has been on the Washington University Engineering faculty since 2001, bringing with him two decades of industry experience at McDonnell Douglas Research Laboratories (now Boeing Co.), NASA Ames Research Center and National Institute for Aviation Research. His research focuses on green aviation, computational fluid dynamics and electromagnetics, flow control, rarified flows, bio-fluid dynamics and microfluidics. He also focuses on nanotechnology, carbon capture and sequestration, chemical looping combustion and renewable energy systems.
He has received numerous honors and awards for his research contributions. In August 2014 he was elected an International Fellow of the Chinese Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics and was the first non-Chinese person in the history of the society to receive the award. In addition, he received the 2014 Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Excellence in Engineering Education (Triple E) Award; 2013 Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) International Leadership Citation; the SAE International 2013 Aerospace Engineering Leadership Award; the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Charles Russ Richards Memorial Award and Fluids Engineering Award; Royal Aeronautical Society Gold Award; American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Aerodynamics Award and Thermophysics Award; James B. Eads Award of Academy of Science of St. Louis; American Society for Engineering Education/AIAA John Leland Atwood Award; SAE Clarence Kelly Johnson Award; SAE Franklin W. Kolk Award and the AIAA Lindbergh Award, among others.
The School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis focuses intellectual efforts through a new convergence paradigm and builds on strengths, particularly as applied to medicine and health, energy and environment, entrepreneurship and security. With 91 tenured/tenure-track and 40 additional full-time faculty, 1,300 undergraduate students, more than 900 graduate students and more than 23,000 alumni, we are working to leverage our partnerships with academic and industry partners — across disciplines and across the world — to contribute to solving the greatest global challenges of the 21st century.