2019 MMAE Distinguished Alumni Award

On April 5th, 2019, the Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering (MMAE) Department at Armour College of Engineering presented departmental Distinguished Alumni Award to Prof. Thomas C. Corke for his outstanding achievements in the field of mechanical engineering. Prof. Corke is the Clark Chair Professor of Engineering in the Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Notre Dame As part of his visit to IIT, Prof. Corke presented a seminar "Turbulent Boundary Layer Drag Reduction Using Pulsed-DC Plasma Actuation" in front of an audience of MMAE faculty members and students. MMAE Department Chair, Prof. Sumanta Acharya, and faculty congratulated the recipient for the honor.

Biography

Prof. Thomas C. Corke received B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1974, 1976 and 1981, respectively. Currently, Dr. Corke is the Clark Chair Professor of Engineering in the Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Notre Dame. He is a Fellow of the American Association of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), a Fellow of American Association of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). Dr. Corke is the recipient of the University of Notre Dame's 2007 "President's Research Achievement Award" and the 2009 "R.T. Davis Memorial Lecture Award" from the University of Cincinnati. He has received two NASA Achievement Awards for his research. The first was in 1982 in recognition of his Ph.D. research "for outstanding research contributions in the area of turbulence control and viscous drag reduction". The second came in 1995 "for the development of important insights into basic fluid mechanics phenomena and theoretical analysis tools which have contributed to major advances in flow prediction and control including laminar flow control". In 2010, Dr. Corke received the AIAA Aerodynamics Award which is presented annually in recognition of meritorious achievement in the field of applied aerodynamics. His citation read, "For his strong commitment to academic and research achievement, consistent record of superior technical accomplishment and numerous experimental and computational contributions to aerodynamics". In 2014, he received the James A. Burns Award for contributions to the graduate program at the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Corke's research includes hydrodynamic stability and transition to turbulence, fully turbulent flows and flow control. It embraces both experimental and computational approaches at a full range of Mach numbers from incompressible to hypersonic. Dr. Corke is a leading authority on plasma flow control and holds 40 patents on plasma based flow actuators, sensors, adaptive optics and meta-materials. He is the Founding Director of the Notre Dame Institute for Flow Physics and Control (FlowPAC) and the Director of the Notre Dame Hessert Laboratory for Aerospace Research. FlowPAC involves 22 faculty in the College of Engineering and presently supports 70 Ph.D. students. The externally funded research is supported by 13 government agencies and partnerships with 25 companies. Dr. Corke has over 300 publications, including two text books: "Design of Aircraft" and "Wind Energy Design".