Professor S. “Bala” Balachandar is currently William F. Powers Professor in the Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering at the University of Florida. He obtained his B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Madras in 1983. He went on to obtain his Master’s and Doctorate from Brown University. He is the founding Director of the College of Engineering Institute for Computational Engineering at the University of Florida. He is also the Director of the DoE PSAAP Center for Compressible Multiphase Turbulence. Before joining the University of Florida, he was a Professor in the Department of Theoretical & Applied Mechanics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Professor Balachandar’s expertise is in computational multiphase flow, direct and large eddy simulations of transitional and turbulent flows, and integrated multiphysics simulations of complex problems. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. In 2019 he received the Gad Hetsroni Senior Researcher Award from the International Conference on Multiphase Flow and in 2017 received the Freeman Scholar Award from American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He also received the Francois Naftali Frenkiel Award from American Physical Society (APS) Division of Fluid Dynamics (DFD), Doctoral Dissertation Advisor/Mentoring Award from the University of Florida, and the Arnold O. Beckman Award and the University Scholar Award from the University of Illinois. He was an associate editor of the ASME Journal of Fluids Engineering and currently is the co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Multiphase Flow and the associate-editor of the Theoretical and Computational Fluid Dynamics.

Prof Balachandar has published two books, over 230 journal articles and has graduated 46 Ph.D. students.