Ph.D., Professor and Chair, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Dr. Michael W. Plesniak is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at GW. He holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University, and B.S. and M.S. degrees from the Illinois Institute of Technology. Prior to joining GW, he was a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University, the Eugene Kleiner Professor for Innovation in Mechanical Engineering at Polytechnic University of New York, and the Director of the Fluid Dynamics and Hydraulics Program at the National Science Foundation (NSF). Dr. Plesniak is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, an Associate Fellow of the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics, and a member of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society. He has authored over one hundred refereed archival publications and conference papers, over fifty non-refereed publications and presentations, and has presented numerous invited seminars and keynote addresses.
Prof. Plesniak's research interests include bio fluid mechanics and turbulence transport and mixing enhancement. His research group is currently studying the physics of phonation and cardiovascular flows. Phonation involves unsteady pulsatile flow and turbulent structures that affect the aeroacoustics of speech production. Pulsatile unsteady phenomena, coherent vortical structures and transitional flow or turbulence occurring at low Reynolds numbers are common to both of these biological flows. An overarching motivation for studying hemodynamics and speech production is to facilitate surgical planning, i.e. to enable physicians to assess the outcomes of surgical procedures by using faithful computer simulations. Such simulations are on the horizon with the advent of increasingly more powerful high performance computing and cyberinfrastructure, but they still lack many of the appropriate physical models. A particularly exciting research era has been enabled by the nexus of biology, (cyber)informatics, and nanotechnology.