Rajat Mittal

Rajat Mittal, a professor of mechanical engineering, is an expert in computational fluid dynamics.

Mittal’s research group, the Flow Physics and Computation Lab, develops and employs computational methods to model a variety of flows, with a special focus on immersed boundary methods, vortex dominated flows, biomedical fluid dynamics, biological and bioinspired locomotion (swimming and flying), bioacoustics, active flow control, fluid-structure interaction, and high-performance computing. Due to the cross-disciplinary nature of his work, he collaborates extensively with researchers from other disciplines, such as zoology, cardiology, robotics, biomechanics, and dynamics.

Mittal’s work has had a significant impact on the field of computational fluid mechanics and computational biomechanics. His recent research has focused on active and passive control of flows, swimming and flying in animals, multiphysics modeling of heart murmurs, blood clots and heart valves, and the biomechanics of digestion. His research has received funding from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, U.S. Air Force, Office of Naval Research, Army Research Office, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and NASA.

He is an associate editor for four peer-reviewed journals: Frontiers in Computational Physiology and Medicine, Journal of Experimental Biology, Journal of Computational Physics, and International Journal for Numerical Methods in Biomedical Engineering. Mittal has worked as a technical consultant for a variety of organizations, including the Office of Naval Research, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the Alaska Sealife Center. He has received fellowships from the American Physical Society and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He is the recipient of the 1996 Francois Frenkiel and the 2022 Stanley Corrsin Awards from the Division of Fluid Dynamics of the American Physical Society, and the 2006 Lewis Moody and 2021 Freeman Scholar Awards from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Mittal earned his bachelor’s degree in Aeronautical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, in 1989. He received a master’s in aerospace engineering from the University of Florida and a doctorate in applied mechanics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1991 and 1995, respectively. He completed postdoctoral research at the Center for Turbulence Research at Stanford University, where he conducted research in large-eddy simulation of complex turbulent flows.

He has a secondary appointment in the JHU School of Medicine.