L. Gary Leal

University of California, Santa Barbara

1943 – Present

Chemical Engineer

Awarded Bingham Medal 2000

Fellow, Elected 2015

Gary Leal received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Washington in 1965. From there, he obtained an M.S. (1968) and Ph.D. (1969) in Chemical Engineering at Stanford University studying with Andreas Acrivos (1994 Bingham medalist). After graduation, he went to Cambridge University for post-doctoral research as a National Science Foundation Fellow. He then served on the faculty at Caltech from 1970-1989, He also spent time as a Senior Visitor in Applied Mathematics at Cambridge University from 1976 to 1979 and as a Visiting Professor at MIT in 1985/86. Leal left Caltech in 1989 to become Professor of Chemical Engineering and Head of Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, serving as Chair until 1998 and then again from 2004 to 2008. Leal was named the Warren and Katharine Schlinger Professor of Chemical Engineering in 2003.

Gary's research contributions to rheology are characterized by a blend of analysis, computations and sophisticated experiments. His research on drop deformation and breakup led to key results and fundamental insights that have become classic contributions to the field. His group’s results on the dynamics of droplets using a computer-controlled four roll mill laid the foundations for much of the present work on the rheology of blends and emulsions. Furthermore, Gary developed a general theory for describing the dynamics of orientable particles and the migration of particles in weakly-elastic matrix fluids which have become the basis for subsequent constitutive theories for a wide range of microstructural materials. He was also among the first to recognize that the stretching of polymer chains in an inhomogeneous flow depends strongly on the residence time of the chain in different regions of the flow and, together with his student Gerry Fuller (1997 Bingham Medalist), made ingenious use of optical rheometry to obtain some of the most conclusive results on the subject. In addition, he helped popularize the concept of reptation with segmental stretch in entangled solutions and developed an early vector-based version of the reptation model which retains the basic physics and is tractable enough to allow calculations of complex flow-fields of engineering relevance.

Gary has received numerous awards including a Guggenheim fellowship (1976), the Fluid Dynamics Prize from the American Physical Society (2002), and the G.I. Taylor Medal from the Society of Engineering Science. He was elected to the U.S. Academy of Engineering (1987) and is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. In addition, he served as the long-standing editor of the AIP Journal, Physics of Fluids, from 1998-2015. Since 2016 he has served as one of the two editors of the new APS Journal, Physical Review-Fluids.