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College Honors Austin with Xerox Award for Faculty Research
AE Assistant Professor Joanna M. Austin is among eight College of Engineering faculty members recognized with the 2011 Xerox Awards for Faculty Research. Established by the Xerox Foundation, four awards are given to assistant professors for their research productivity and impact during the last academic year.
Austin is conducting research focused on fundamental problems in fluid mechanics, particularly in reacting, compressible flows that occur in a broad range of applications: hypervelocity planetary entry, shock-driven bubble collapse, detonation and supersonic combustion, and high speed flow phenomena in geological applications such as explosive volcanic eruptions.
AE Assistant Professor Joanna M. Austin
Her research is predominantly experimental, combined with analytical modeling. Upon her arrival at Illinois in 2003, she established the Compressible Fluid Mechanics (CFM) laboratory, and with the support of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, built the Hypervelocity Expansion Tube (HET) facility. This facility uses a novel method of gas acceleration to produce a minimally contaminated free-stream representative of planetary entry conditions for ground-based testing.
Austin has conducted a number of fundamental studies using the HET and other facilities in the CFM lab and has been published widely in such journals as Physics of Fluids, Progress in Aerospace Sciences, Journal of Fluid Mechanics, Journal of Geophysical Research, and AIAA Journal. The depth and innovation of her research has led to funding by AFOSR, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation, and industries such as Gulfstream and Rolls-Royce.
Her honors and awards include the Richard Bruce Chapman Memorial Award for distinguished research in hydrodynamics in the Engineering and Applied Sciences Division at Caltech, the Young Investigator Program Award from AFOSR, Best Paper Award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Fluid Dynamics Technical Committee, and an NSF Career Award.
