Mike Anderson Awarded Tom L. Popejoy Dissertation Prize

Mike Ander­son with Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Mechan­i­cal Engi­neer­ing Peter Vorobieff.

The 2012 Pope­joy Dis­ser­ta­tion Prize has been awarded to Mike Ander­son. The award, which was estab­lished as a per­ma­nent memo­r­ial to late UNM Pres­i­dent Tom L. Pope­joy, rec­og­nizes and encour­ages the high­est level of aca­d­e­mic excel­lence among doc­toral students.

Ander­son per­formed ground­break­ing research bridg­ing exper­i­men­tal and com­pu­ta­tional fluid dynam­ics in a devel­op­ing area of high-speed com­press­ible mul­ti­phase flow. He par­tic­i­pated in state-of-the-art exper­i­ments, but more impor­tantly, he per­formed numer­i­cal sim­u­la­tions of the exper­i­ments that made it pos­si­ble for his research group to develop a phys­i­cal under­stand­ing of exper­i­men­tal data, which led to the dis­cov­ery of a hydro­dy­namic insta­bil­ity mech­a­nism pro­vi­sion­ally named “gen­er­al­ized Rayleigh-Taylor and Richtmyer-Meshkov insta­bil­ity” or “particle-lag instability.”

His work was pub­lished in “Phys­i­cal Review Let­ters,” along with ref­er­eed pro­ceed­ings of two inter­na­tional con­fer­ences in 2011, and will lead to three more pub­li­ca­tions to be sub­mit­ted in 2012. Anderson’s men­tor, Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Mechan­i­cal Engi­neer­ing Peter Voro­bi­eff, says “Mike’s con­tri­bu­tion to our research group sheds light on the physics behind many phe­nom­ena — from vor­tices rolling up in inter­stel­lar dusty plasma accel­er­ated by a shock from a super­nova explo­sion to enhanced mix­ing of fuel droplets in a scram­jet or a chem­i­cal laser. In addi­tion, his involve­ment in our project was a per­fect com­bi­na­tion of indi­vid­ual (com­pu­ta­tional) and team­work (exper­i­ment), and helped develop ties between UNM and a local hi-tech com­pany (ARA).”

Media Con­tact: Karen Went­worth (505) 277‑5627; email: kwent2@unm.edu