Satish Kumar, Distinguished McKnight University Professor in the Dept. of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the Univ. of Minnesota, has been chosen to present AIChE’s William R. Schowalter Lecture at the 2025 AIChE Annual Meeting, Nov. 2–6 in Boston, MA.
About the Schowalter Lecture
Endowed by the AIChE Foundation, the lectureship is named for William Schowalter, a Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering at Princeton Univ., as well as a pioneer in the field of fluid mechanics and influential academic leader. Reflecting Schowalter’s contributions to chemical engineering, the lecture’s subject matter alternates between topics related to fluid mechanics and topics of general interest to the profession. Lectures covering fluid mechanics are typically delivered by a speaker from academia, while topics of general interest are usually presented by a speaker from industry. The 2025 lecture will focus on fluid mechanics.
In his lecture on Nov. 5, Kumar will discuss the partnership between research institutions and industry, and how those collaborations can serve as inspiration for fundamental academic research, experimentation, and problem-solving through fluid mechanics.
More on Kumar’s background
Satish Kumar received his undergraduate degree from the Univ. of Minnesota, and his MS and PhD from Stanford Univ., all in chemical engineering. After performing postdoctoral work at the École Normale Supérieure and the Univ. of Michigan, he joined the Univ. of Minnesota faculty in 2001. His research integrates transport phenomena, colloid and interface science, rheology, and applied and computational mathematics with experiments that address fundamental issues in materials processing. He has documented his research in more than 170 journal articles, which have frequently been inspired by industrial applications such as coating and printing processes, polymer processing, nanofluidics, and energy.
Kumar is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Engineering Mathematics and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics. A Fellow of the American Physical Society, he has served on the Executive Committee of its Division of Fluid Dynamics. He is also a former president of the International Society of Coating Science and Technology, and he is a member of the U.S. National Committee on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. He served as Faculty Director of the Univ. of Minnesota’s Industrial Partnership for Research in Interfacial and Materials Engineering (IPRIME), a university-industry consortium, and he is currently co-director of its Coating Process Fundamentals program.
This article originally appeared in the Institute News column in the August 2025 issue of CEP. Members have access online to complete issues, including a vast, searchable archive of back issues found at www.aiche.org/cep.
