Thompson awarded international visiting fellowship
David Thompson
An aerospace engineering professor received a high-profile fellowship in the United Kingdom.
David Thompson earned the Distinguished Visiting Fellowship from the Royal Academy of Engineering. He will spend a month this spring visiting Cardiff University and Swansea University in Wales and the University of Strathclyde in Scotland.
“I’m looking forward to visiting the different universities and getting a sense of what they do,” Thompson said. “I enjoy finding out what’s going on at other universities and seeing how we can work together.”
The fellowship will cover Thompson’s travel and living expenses. He will give lectures and workshops on topics in computational fluid dynamics at the United Kingdom universities. He will also have the opportunity to work with various groups such as the Cardiff Marine Engineering Research Group.
One of the research group’s projects involves placing marine turbines near the coasts of the United Kingdom. These turbines convert the kinetic energy of the tides, a predictable, renewable energy source, into electricity. Thompson plans to use his expertise in vortex flows to help the group better understand the wake produced by a turbine. This knowledge will enable researchers at Cardiff to determine how far apart to place these turbines so the wake interference does not negatively affect the next downstream turbine.
Thompson, Jackson State University, the Cardiff research group, and other international partners recently submitted a pre-proposal to the National Science Foundation’s Partnership for International Research and Education program. It focuses on creating computational tools to investigate the use of in-stream hydrokinetic turbines in rivers like the Mississippi.
“The collaboration is mutually beneficial for Cardiff and MSU,” Thompson said. “Cardiff has significant expertise in simulating marine installations, which exploit tidal energy, and we have some CFD expertise that they don’t have.”
If this pre-proposal is accepted, Thompson will be able to work on the full proposal with these international partners while at Cardiff University.
Thompson said he hopes this opportunity will help foster international collaboration for the Bagley College of Engineering in the future.
“I think there will be more opportunities to interchange ideas and develop relationships with other universities in the U.K.,” Thompson said. “It also provides visibility for the university, the research centers and the departments.”
Thompson earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in aerospace engineering from Mississippi State University in 1979 and 1980, respectively. He holds a doctorate in aerospace engineering from Iowa State University. His research focuses on mesh generation, vortex detection and visualization, simulating vortex-dominated flows, and aircraft icing.
Thompson was appointed associate director of the Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems in 2009, and now serves as the lead for the computational fluid dynamics group. He is the inaugural holder of the Airbus Helicopters Inc. Professorship in Aerospace Engineering and received the BCoE Hearin Faculty Excellence Award in 2010.
The Royal Academy of Engineering Distinguished Visiting Fellowship provides funding to enable an academic engineering department at a U.K. university to be a host, for up to a month, to a fellow from an overseas academic institution in order to promote collaborations by facilitating visits by distinguished international experts.
To learn more about the RAE Distinguished Visiting Fellowship, see www.raeng.org.uk.
For more information about the Bagley College of Engineering, visit www.bagley.msstate.edu.
Jen Nguyen | Bagley College of Engineering
