Charles Williamson

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Cornell University

Charles Williamson received his PhD from Cambridge University in 1982, and after working in an offshore company in London, and private tutoring for the Prince Pavlos of Greece, he was a Research Fellow at Caltech from 1984-1989, working with Anatol Roshko. He has been at Cornell University since 1990. He was Associate Director of the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department from 1999-2002. His research interests are in wakes, vortex-induced vibrations, aircraft wake vortex interactions, including dynamics of counter-rotating and co-rotating vortices, transition to turbulence, and ocean engineering. Charles spent a sabatical at Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, in 1996, and is presently on sabatical again for much of 2003, spending periods at Monash University, Melbourne, as well as Caltech, and also IRPHE, Marseilles, France. Some time will also be spent at Darmstadt, Germany, and Eindhoven, Netherlands, and Oxford, England, on collaborative projects. Charles is an editor of the Journal of Fluids and Structures, and has been the founder and Chairman of a series of international conferences BBVIV (Bluff Body Wakes and Vortex-Induced Vibrations) at Washington (1998), Marseille (2000), and Port Douglas, Queensland, Australia (2002), Santorini (island), Greece (2005). Charles Williamson has been awarded 9 teaching prizes at Cornell, including a national prize from the Keck Foundation in 1995 ($10,000), and the Weiss Presidential Fellowship out of 1500 faculty at Cornell in 1999 ($25,000). Charles has been invited to write two reviews for Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics (1996 and 2004), and his papers have been cited 1,400 times.

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