Serpil Kocabiyik

Serpil Kocabiyik is a Professor of Mathematics at Memorial University of Newfoundland, leading research in fluid mechanics and computational science. She holds a Ph.D. from Western Ontario (1987) and has held academic positions at Manitoba and Western Ontario. Her work focuses on unsteady separated flows, vortex-induced vibrations, and numerical simulation methodologies.

Education: B.Sc. & M.Sc. (Middle East Technical University, 1979/1981), Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics (University of Western Ontario, 1987). Postdoctoral fellowships followed before joining Memorial in 1999 as Associate Professor, promoted to Full Professor in 2005.

Research Interests: Interdisciplinary applied mathematics, theoretical fluid mechanics, computational science. Specializes in fluid-bluff body interactions, numerical methods for PDEs, and validation across computational/experimental studies.

Key Contributions: Over 80 refereed papers, $2M+ in grants, and mentorship of >30 students/postdocs. Pioneered studies on free surface flows with moving bodies and developed parallelized CFD algorithms.

• First woman in Canada to win Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award (2000)
• CAIMS Arthur Beaumont Distinguished Service Award (2006)

Teaching: Courses include Numerical Algorithms, Fluid Mechanics, Partial Differential Equations. Advocated for STEM education equity, training 17→50 graduate students in her department (1999–2009).