Curtis Haas, a first-year doctoral student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has won a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship, awarded by the US Department of Defense.
The highly-competitive NDSEG fellowship covers three years of full tuition and provides a stipend and travel allowance.
Haas is advised by Tamer Zaki, professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Flow Science and Engineering research group. The fellowship will help support Haas’ research on turbulence and hypersonic flows using computational methods and mathematical analysis. He is particularly interested in inverse problems and data assimilation techniques associated with hypersonic turbulence.
In current fluid mechanics research, simulations and experiments are often performed separately. Both approaches have their own distinct advantages; but they also each have limitations due to the chaotic nature of turbulence, especially in high-speed regimes. By combining aspects of each method using novel data assimilation techniques, Haas hopes to utilize the advantages of both methods while alleviating the deficiencies of each technique on their own. His work involves computational modeling on high performance computers, the development of new mathematical frameworks, and establishing the key physics associated with the fluid flows.
Originally from Dover, New Hampshire, Haas completed his undergraduate studies in physics and mathematics at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. At Johns Hopkins, Haas was the inaugural recipient of the Stanley Corrsin Graduate Fellowship in Fluid Dynamics, awarded by the Center for Environmental and Applied Fluid Mechanics (CEAFM).
In addition to the NDSEG fellowship, Haas was selected for the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), which recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported STEM disciplines pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited U.S. institutions.