Tim Colonius

Tim Colonius is the Frank and Ora Lee Marble Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Medical Engineering and holds the Cecil and Sally Drinkward Leadership Chair at the California Institute of Technology. He has been affiliated with Caltech since 1994 and currently serves as Executive Officer for Mechanical and Civil Engineering. Colonius earned his B.S. from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), and both his M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University.

Research Interests: His work focuses on fluid dynamics (global instabilities, cavitation, aerodynamic sound), flow control (closed-loop control, reduced-order modeling), and biomedical applications (shock waves, lithotripsy, ultrasound). He also develops advanced numerical methods for interface capturing, immersed-boundary techniques, and high-order accuracy.

Scientific Contributions: Recent publications highlight his research in multiphase flows, vortex ring collisions, turbulent jet analysis, GPU-accelerated simulations, and biomedical applications. His group uses computational and data-driven approaches to study turbulence, instabilities, and flow optimization.

• Scientific Awards:
  • AIAA Aeroacoustics Award
  • Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America
  • Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS)
  • NSF and DoD research grants