Professors Nichols & Coletti Promoted
The Department of Aerospace Engineering & Mechanics is pleased to announce the promotions of Professors Joseph Nichols and Filippo Coletti from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor, effective beginning of Fall Semester 2019.
Professor Nichols received his B.S degrees in Computer Engineering & Computer Science from Pacific Lutheran University in 1999. He then went on to complete his M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Washington in 2001 and 2005, respectively. Prior to joining the University of Minnesota, Professor Nichols was a Post-doctoral Research Associate at Ecole Polytechnique, in Paris, France, and a Research Associate at the Center for Turbulence Research at Stanford University.
Professor Nichols’ current interests are in the areas of aeroacoustics of high-speed jets and the stability and sensitivity analysis of hypersonic flows. He has performed some of the largest Computational Fluid Dynamics simulations in the world, involving massively parallel high-fidelity Large Eddy Simulation of tactical aircraft engine exhausts, running on more than a million computer processors simultaneously. He recently was awarded an INCITE grant of computational resources at the DoE Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. He is currently developing novel and scalable stability and transition analysis tools for hypersonic flow over complex geometry. His goal is to apply these tools to transition prediction on a full hypersonic vehicle.
He is also an active member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and the America Physical Society (APS) in the Division of Fluid Dynamics.
Professor Coletti received his B.S. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Perugia (Italy) in 2003 and 2005, respectively. He completed his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering at the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics (Belgium) and at the University of Stuttgart (Germany) in 2010. He was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Stanford University before becoming Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota in 2014. Professor Coletti was designated a McKnight Land-Grant Professor in 2018 and was awarded the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2015. At the University of Minnesota he is also a member of the Institute for Engineering in Medicine and of the Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory.
Professor Coletti works in experimental fluid dynamics. His research interests are focused along two main axes. On the fundamental side, he studies dispersed multiphase flows, and especially the dynamics of solid particles suspended in turbulent fluids. These phenomena are especially relevant to environmental processes such as atmospheric precipitation and pollution transport. On the applied side, Coletti investigates bio-fluid mechanics problems. In particular, he explores the relation between anatomical structure and organ-level function in respiratory and cardiovascular settings, by using both idealized and realistic in vitro models. The questions are tackled using a broad range of measurement techniques, including Particle Image Velocimetry and Magnetic Resonance Imaging.
Please join the department in congratulating these accomplished professors. The department looks forward to their continued success.