Brown School of Engineering Professor Roberto Zenit has been named associate editor of the journal, Physical Review Fluids. Since 2016, Zenit had been serving on the editorial board of the publication.
“Being invited to be an editor of one of the most important journals in the field of fluid mechanics is, of course, an honor but it also comes with great responsibility,” Zenit said. “In addition to handling papers fairly and promptly, one can help steer the direction of the field into addressing problems of current relevance. For fluid mechanics, it could be infectious diseases, climate change, and many others.”
Zenit joined Brown Engineering in the fall of 2019, where his area of expertise is fluid mechanics. He has worked in a wide variety of subjects including multiphase and granular flows, biological flows, rheology, and more recently, the fluid mechanics of art history. Assisting with several projects in response to the COVID-19 crisis, he was awarded money from a newly created University fund to fast track innovative research proposals that directly addressed the urgent needs of the pandemic. Zenit teamed with fellow professors Dan Harris and Jacob Rosenstein to design a do-it-yourself ventilator made freely available online that can be easily deployed in resource-strapped situations.
He received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Caltech in 1998, and after a postdoctoral appointment at Cornell University, he moved to Mexico City in 2000 to become a faculty member at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones en Materiales. Zenit is a fellow of the American Physical Society.
Physical Review Fluids (PRFluids) is dedicated to publishing innovative research that will significantly advance the fundamental understanding of fluid dynamics. PRFluids embraces both traditional fluid dynamics topics and newer areas, such as bio-related fluid dynamics, micro- and nanoscale flows, fluid mechanics of complex fluids and soft materials, and geophysical and environmental flows. Like all of the journals in the Physical Review family, PRFluids is shaped by researchers to serve the research community. The journal is international, with approximately three-fifths of published articles originating from outside the U.S.