“Visionary.” “Indefatigable.” “Ahead of the curve.” These are just a few of the terms used to describe Mohamed Gad-el-Hak, Ph.D., professor emeritus in the Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering, in the July 2020 issue of the Journal of Fluids Engineering.

(From left) Mohamed Gad-el-Hak, Ph.D., in 2002, when he joined VCU, and in 2005, at a Johns Hopkins University reunion.

“Homage to a Legendary Dynamicist on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday,” authored by six scholars from research universities across the U.S. and abroad, celebrates Gad-el-Hak’s many achievements in mechanical engineering and classical physics. His research has been cited more than 14,600 times in peer-reviewed literature and featured on NPR and PBS and in the journal Nature, Newsweek and The New York Times.

Gad-el-Hak joined Virginia Commonwealth University in 2002 as chair of mechanical engineering and the Inez Caudill Eminent Professor of Biomedical Engineering. During his tenure as chair, he initiated VCU’s graduate and undergraduate programs in nuclear engineering.

Laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) visualization of an arrowhead turbulent region in a sea of laminar flow. Gad-el-Hak authored the first archival paper to describe the LIF visualization technique. He also identified the mechanism by which a turbulent region grows into a laminar, vortical flow.

Gad-el-Hak expressed his appreciation to the colleagues who surprised him with this birthday recognition. He also conveyed his heartfelt gratitude to the thousands of undergraduate and graduate students who have “kept him as enthusiastic today as on the hot and humid summer day in 1968” when he arrived in Baltimore to begin his research and discovery journey at Johns Hopkins University. For more than 50 years, Gad-el-Hak said, he has “grasped from his students infinitely more than they learned from him.”

Read the full Journal of Fluids Engineering tribute to Gad-el-Hak here.