Rui Ni is an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on the fundamental science of turbulence and multi-phase flows that involve more than one phase (i.e. liquid, solid, or gas) and has applications in next-generation energy systems, environmental engineering, and physiological flows in the human body.
Ni earned his PhD in physics from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2011. He worked as a postdoctoral scholar at Yale University and Wesleyan University before joining Penn State University in 2015, where he held the Kenneth Kuan-Yun Kuo Early Career Professorship in mechanical engineering. He is the recipient of a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s Experimental Physics Investigators Initiative and also received the NSF CAREER Award in fluid dynamics and the ACS-PRF New Investigator Award.