Message from the Chair

It is an exciting time in AME - how could it not be? But it is especially interesting as we embark upon a careful expansion and growth into new and vibrant areas. Recent hires have been in robotics and autonomous systems, in flexible and porous structures in fluids (think sea-weed, forests, flexible wings), and in high-performance computing of high-speed, reacting flows. I'm very happy to draw special attention to two new hires in 2016: Professor S.K. Gupta, from the University of Maryland, is in the midst of setting up a new Center for Advanced Manufacturing, which will be a novel, multidisciplinary source of research tools and collaboration, and teaching for AME and the Viterbi School of Engineering. Professor Alejandra Uranga, from MIT, was project lead on an industry-academia consortium to design the next generation of passenger aircraft. You will doubtless hear more from both these fronts in the near future.

This Newsletter, we feature some of the work of Professor Kanso, who works at many points in the complex interface between biology, fluid mechanics and mathematics. She has worked on swimming fish, falling coins, hovering hats, ciliary transport and propulsion, and in the featured story, on the human-bacterial ecosystem, whose importance and functions are just now being glimpsed. This work is in collaboration with faculty at the Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience, to be housed in a building that is rising beneath a crane I can see from my window as I write these words.

I must end with an enthusiastic tip of the hat to our awesome students, both undergraduate and graduate. Each summer we work away in comparative quiet and concentration, slightly nervously eyeing the calendar, as the new school year approaches. And then here they are, washing over us in a tidal wave of enthusiasm and talent that is our privilege to surf and sail.

So, welcome and read on for further tastes of things to come, in AME, and in the world.

Geoff Spedding, PhD

Professor and Chair, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

geoff@usc.edu