Dr. Miguel Alfonso Mendez appointed assistant professor in the faculty

We have the pleasure to announce that the Board of directors has appointed Dr. Miguel Alfonso Mendez as an assistant professor in the VKI faculty, in the environmental and applied fluid dynamics department, entering into effect as from 1st of May 2019 .

Miguel Alfonso Mendez graduated from the “Universita Degli Studi di Firenze” in 2012, and followed the VKI Diploma Course in Environmental and Applied Fluid Dynamics the year after, which he graduated with honors and the von Karman price for the best overall result in course work and research project.

He then joined the Ph.D. program of VKI, awarded by a FRIA Fellowship from FNRS, working on the experimental analysis of the jet wiping process and the development of active flow control methods in a research project funded by ArcelorMittal. He received his Ph.D. in engineering science from “Université Libre de Bruxelles” in 2018.
During his Ph.D., he participated to several VKI projects, involving modeling and experimental analysis of particle-laden flows (CETIM), wire coating stability (BEKAERT), micro-gravity (64th ESA Parabolic Flight) and image-based velocimetry in two-phase flows (Horizon 2020/Clean Sky).

During his Post-doctoral research at the VKI, he worked on the nonlinear stability analysis of the wiping process, developing a dedicated CFD software package called BLEW (Boundary Layer Wiping). Besides experimental fluid mechanics and engineering modeling of fluid flows, his main research activities include advanced data processing, model order reduction, machine learning, and flow control. He is the VKI coordinator for the joint laboratory VKI-Dantec Dynamics and organizer of the new VKI Lecture series titled ‘Machine Learning in Fluid Mechanics: Analysis, Modeling Control and Closures, together with Prof. B. Noack (LIMSI-CNRS), Prof. A. Ianiro (Univ Carlos III) and Prof. S. Brunton (Univ of Washinton).