Freund Chosen for APS Frenkiel Award

4/9/2013 Written by Susan Mumm

Jonathan B. Freund, associate professor in Aerospace Engineering, has been selected as the 2008 winner of the Francois Frenkiel Award, a prestigious honor given by the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics.

Written by Written by Susan Mumm

Associate Professor Jonathan B. Freund
Associate Professor Jonathan B. Freund
Associate Professor Jonathan B. Freund
Jonathan B. Freund, associate professor in Aerospace Engineering, has been selected as the 2008 winner of the Francois Frenkiel Award, a prestigious honor given by the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics.

Freund was chosen for his paper, "Leukocyte margination in a model microvessel," published in the February 20, 2007, online edition of Physics of Fluids. The Frenkiel Award recognizes significant contributions to fluid mechanics that have been published by young investigators in Physics of Fluids during the preceding year.

Freund's research concerned the fluid mechanics of white blood cells when a body responds to physiological inflammation. Said Freund, "As part of inflammation, the white cells somehow get preferentially pushed toward the walls of vessels. There have been lots of ideas about why this happens. My simulation model suggests that it just involves the interaction with the red cells."

Continuing, he said, "I was also able to look at the detailed flow when a white cell is near the wall and explain, in part, why, once there, it is in a relatively stable configuration. I developed a sophisticated simulation tool to study these mechanisms."

Freund has appointments in Aerospace Engineering and in Mechanical Science and Engineering at Illinois. His research areas include aerodynamic sound, compressible turbulence, numerical methods, large-scale parallel computing, molecular dynamics simulation of nanometer scale flows and heat transfer in solids.

Prior to coming to Illinois in 2001, Freund had been an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, for three and a half years. He had earned his bachelor’s, master’s and PhD in mechanical engineering from Stanford University in 1991, 1992 and 1998, respectively.

Freund’s work had been selected in 2000 for the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics Gallery of Fluid Motion.


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This story was published April 9, 2013.