The third in the Viterbi School's Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Laufer lecture series took place March 3.

The speaker was Stephen H. Davis, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Engineering Sciences and

from left: AME's Tony Maxworthy, Laufer lecturer Stephen Davis, chair Geoff Spedding

Applied Mathematics  and McCormick School Professor  Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics Department of Northwestern University, speaking on "Control and Suppression of Interfacial Instabilities by Shear."

"There has been recent work on the control of instabilities using feedback and control theory to at least delay instability," Davis' synopsis notes. "Here, we shall discuss an alternative in which imposed shear flows can delay or eliminate interfacial instabilities though the shear triggers others that are less 'harmful.' This will be illustrated by the suppression of Van der Waals rupture instability in ultra-thin liquid films."

AME chair Geoff Spedding welcomed Davis, joined by numerous AME faculty members.

The annual lecture series is named after the late Janos Laufer, a renowned fluids authority who was the founding chair of the Department of Aerospace Engineering (before it merged with mechanical engineering).

Previous Laufer lecturers have included Elaine Oran from the Naval Research Laboratory (2009) and inaugural lecturer Anatol Ruschko (2007).