Lecturers
Ronald K. Hanson received his Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University. He has been affiliated with the mechanical engineering department at Stanford since 1972, serving as department chair from 1993-2003 and holding the Woodard Chair from 1994. He has advised over 85 Ph.D. graduates and authored or co-authored over 500 journal publications in the fields of laser diagnostics and sensors, shock wave physics, advanced propulsion and combustion chemistry. Dr. Hanson is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the Optical Society of America (OSA), and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). He is a recipient of the Silver Medal and the Alfred Egerton Gold Medal of the Combustion Institute, the R.I.Soloukhin Award of the Institute for Dynamics of Explosions and Reactive Systems (IDERS), and the AIAA Awards for Propellants and Combustion and for Advanced Measurement Technology.
Moshe Matalon received his Ph.D in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Cornell University in 1978. After two years on the faculty of the Aerodynamics Laboratories of the Polytechnic Institute of New York he joined the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern, where he was Professor of Mechanical Engineering and of Applied Mathematics. In 2007 he joined the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where he holds the College of Engineering Caterpillar Chair. His research interests are in combustion theory, theoretical fluid mechanics and applied mathematics. In combustion, he made contributions to a wide range of topics including the structure and dynamics of premixed and diffusion flames, edge flames, stretched flames, combustion instabilities and turbulent flames, and combustion of condensed fuels. Matalon is Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and the Institute of Physics (IOP). He received numerous honors and awards, most notably the Pendray Aerospace Literature award of the AIAA. Professor Matalon is the editor-in-chief of Combustion Theory and Modelling and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. He also serves on the board of Progress in Energy and Combustion Science.
Michael J. Pilling received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1967. He first worked in Cambridge and Oxford Universities and was appointed Professor of Physical Chemistry at Leeds in 1989. Professor Pilling has worked extensively in chemical kinetics for over 30 years, especially on laboratory measurements using laser flash photolysis. Professor Pilling’s research interests center on fundamental chemical kinetics and applications in atmospheric chemistry and combustion. Professor Pilling was the Chairman of the UK Air Quality Expert Group and the Director of the Distributed Institute for Atmospheric Composition (DIAC) in the UK, both from 2002 - 2008. He has published over 300 papers and was awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry Prizes for Reaction Kinetics in 1992 and Combustion and Hydrocarbon Oxidation in 2001, the Sugden Prize of the Combustion Institute in 1993, the Polanyi Medal at the 13th International Symposium on Gas Kinetics in 1994, the Haagen Smit prize in 2010 and he was the Royal Society of Chemistry’s John Jeyes Lecturer for Environmental Science in 2001. He was awarded a CBE in 2008.
Thierry Poinsot received his Ph.D. in heat transfer from Ecole Centrale Paris in 1983 and his These d’Etat in combustion in 1987. He is a research director at IMFT (CNRS) in Toulouse, head of the CFD group at CERFACS, senior research fellow at Stanford University and consultant for various companies. Dr. Poinsot’s research interests are in combustion theory, numerical methods for turbulent and laminar flames, combustion instabilities, massively parallel simulations for gas turbines, piston engines, rockets and furnaces. He is the author (with Dr. Denis Veynante) of the textbook “Theoretical and Numerical Combustion”.