Eric S.G. Shaqfeh
Stanford University
Chemical Engineer
Awarded Bingham Medal 2011
Fellow, Elected 2015
Eric Shaqfeh is Professor and former Chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University. In 1981 he received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University.
He received both a M.S., in 1982, and a Ph.D., in 1986, in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University. After a postdoc in the Department of Applied Math and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP)
at the Universitty of Cambridge, Dr. Shaqfeh began his career as a member of the technical staff of AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1987 working closely with Susan Muller and Ron Larson
(2002 Bingham Medalist) in pioneering studies on purely elastic instabilities in polymer solutions. In 1990 he
moved to academia as Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at Stanford. Currently he holds positions in the Department of Chemical Engineering, the Institute of Computational and
Mathematical Engineering, and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford. He served as the Chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering from 2011-2018.
Dr. Shaqfeh’s research interests span theoretical fluid mechanics, suspension mechanics and rheology, viscoelastic fluid mechanics and stability theory, as well as the microscale dynamics
of dilute flexible polymers. He currently studies entangled polymer dynamics, polymer turbulent drag reduction, polymer biophysics, vesicle dynamics and the rheology of blood. Dr. Shaqfeh’s
work has contributed to our understanding of the microrheology of complex fluids in a number of ways. He is well known for his theories of transport in suspensions of rigid rods at finite
volume fractions, including non-local interactions. He has also produced the most significant body of world-wide work on Brownian dynamics simulations of flexible polymers. In conjunction
with his Stanford colleague Steve Chu he led ground-breaking experiments and simulations on long chain DNA molecules in various flows. This work showed the transitions between polymer
stretching and tumbling, and when combined with Brownian dynamics simulations, provided a complete theoretical and experimental understanding of the molecular dynamics of dilute flexible
polymers in general velocity gradients. Additionally, his recent work on direct numerical simulations of turbulent flows of viscoelastic fluids has greatly enhanced our understanding
of the mechanisms of polymer drag reduction.
Dr. Shaqfeh has been the recipient of many awards and honors. He revived the Francois N. Frenkiel Award of the American Physical Society, Division of Fluid Dynamics, in 1989;
the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1990; the ASEE Curtis W. McGraw Research Award in 1998, and the
Bingham Medal of The Society of Rheology in 2011. He was honored as a Fellow of the American Physical Society
in 2000. Dr. Shaqfeh is currently the Associate Editor of Physical Research, Fluids (PRF) and also serves on the editorial boards of three other journals.