Prof. Drikakis Recipient of US Air Force Research Award
Professor Dimitris Drikakis recently received a personal Research Award from the US Air Force Office for Scientific Research.
The Award concerns a 3-year research program into the acoustic fatigue of high-speed airframes, such as supersonic/hypersonic planes and rockets, and it is associated with random pressure acoustic fluctuations within the turbulent flow. This is the second time that Professor Drikakis is the recipient of this award.
The award cements the relationship of Prof. Drikakis with the US Air Force, while it also opens up opportunities for new research projects in the future.
The newly established Defense and Security Research Institute (DSRI) at UNIC will also benefit from the above research given the DSRI’s engagement with aerospace and defense applications. In addition to the collaboration with the US Air Force, Prof. Drikakis will also collaborate with ETH Zurich.
The methods and models developed within the framework of this award will also be applicable to other cross-disciplinary problems involving sound and/or turbulence effects, e.g. medical applications, environmental noise pollution, and vibration control in engineering structures.
About Professor Dimitris Drikakis
Professor Dimitris Drikakis is the Vice President for Global Partnerships and Executive Director, Research and Innovation at the University of Nicosia, Cyprus. He has a joint professor’s appointment in the School of Sciences and Engineering, and Medical School. Prior to that, he held academic and executive posts as Professor, Executive Dean, and Head of Department at various UK universities over a period of 24 years; he has also held senior academic/research posts in Germany and France. He has obtained his Meng (Mechanical Engineering) and PhD from the National Technical University of Athens (Greece). His research is multidisciplinary and covers topics of engineering science and emerging technologies, including fluid mechanics, acoustics, materials, computational science and nanotechnologies with applications to aerospace, defence, energy and biomedical sector. He has received the William Penney Fellowship Award by the UK’s Atomic Establishment in recognition of his contributions to multicomponent flows; and the Innovator of the Year Award (2014) by the UK’s Innovation Institute for a new generation carbon capture nanotechnology device. He has co-authored two books and has published 417 papers in journals and conference proceedings. He has graduated 45 PhD students who now hold positions in academia and industries around the world. He has also been an Assoc. Editor of Computers and Fluids; Journal of Fluids Engineering; The Aeronautical Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society; Journal of Computational and Theoretical Nanoscience; (advisory board) Physics of Fluids; as well as serves on editorial boards in several journals in the fields of Engineering (Aerospace, Biomedical, Energy, Defence), Computational Science, Applied Physics, and Nanotechnology. He has also served on the Fluid Dynamics Technical Committee of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics; Board of Directors of the European Aeronautics Science Network; European Research Council (Engineering – Deputy Chair); European Commission (evaluator); UK’s Oil and Gas Technology Centre (OGTC), as a Chair of the academic panel.
