Draft:Kenneth Breuer

Kenneth Breuer is a Professor of Engineering and Professor of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology at Brown University and the director of the Center of Fluid Mechanics at Brown University. He is a fellow of the APS, ASME, and Associate Fellow of AIAA, and a Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology member.

Education
Kenny Breuer received his ScB from Brown and his MSc and PhD from MIT. He spent two years at Brown as a Post Doctoral Fellow in Applied Mathematics and nine years on the faculty of MIT in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics before returning to Brown in 1999. He was a visiting professor at the University of Queensland in 2005, Harvard University in 2008, Paris Tech. in 2015, Imperial College and Tel Aviv University in 2019, and the University of Colorado in 2022.

Research
His research interests cover a wide range of topics in fluid mechanics. Among these topics are the mechanics and dynamics of bat and bird flight, fluid-structure interactions, focusing on the interactions of fluids with extremely compliant structures, vortex dynamics, renewable energy harvesting, bioinspired engineering, and micron-scale bio-fluid mechanics.

At the macro-scale, he has worked on animal flight mechanics, the formation, growth, and unsteady dynamics of vortical flows, flow interactions with highly compliant structures such as membrane and spring-mounted wings, and energy harvesting from fluid flows.

At the micron scale, he pioneered the mechanics of bacterial motility and flagellar mechanics, the nanoscale flow near a moving contact line, and the development of nanoscale velocimetry techniques.

Selected Publications

 * E. B. Arkilic, M. A. Schmidt and K. S. Breuer, "Gaseous slip flow in long microchannels," in Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 167-178, June 1997, doi: 10.1109/84.585795.
 * Chang-Hwan Choi, K. Johan A. Westin, Kenneth S. Breuer; Apparent slip flows in hydrophilic and hydrophobic microchannels. Physics of Fluids 1 October 2003; 15 (10): 2897–2902.
 * Darnton, N., Turner, L., Breuer, K., & Berg, H. C. (2004). Moving fluid with bacterial carpets. Biophysical journal, 86(3), 1863-1870.


 * Arkilic Errol B, Breuer Kenneth S, Schmidt Martin A. Mass flow and tangential momentum accommodation in silicon micromachined channels. Journal of Fluid Mechanics. Cambridge University Press; 2001;437:29–43.
 * Song, Arnold, et al. "Aeromechanics of membrane wings with implications for animal flight." AIAA journal 46.8 (2008): 2096-2106.
 * Liu, Bin, Thomas R. Powers, and Kenneth S. Breuer. "Force-free swimming of a model helical flagellum in viscoelastic fluids." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108.49 (2011): 19516-19520.
 * Breuer, Kenneth S., ed. Microscale diagnostic techniques. New York: Springer, 2005.
 * A Gallery of Fluid Motion. Edited By M. Samimy, K. S. Breuer, L. G. Leal & P. H. Steen. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
 * Multi-media fluid mechanics, by G. M. Homsy, H. Aref, K. S. Breuer, S. Hochgreb, J. R. Koseff and B.R. Munson. 2000.

Education and outreach
He is active in fluid dynamics education and outreach. He is a co-author of the best-selling DVD: Multimedia Fluid Mechanics (Camb. Univ. Press), and co-editor of the compilation of flow visualization: A Gallery of Fluid Motion (Camb. Univ. Press). He has also appeared on programs such as PBS’s NOVA (Bat superpowers, 2021; The four-winged dinosaur, 2008), NPR’s Science Friday, the Discovery Channel’s series Weird Connections, and the BBC’s series Invisible Worlds. His research has been featured in the New York Times, Discover magazine and has highlighted on the National Science Foundation website.

Awards and honors

 * National Merit Scholar (1978)
 * ONR Graduate Research Fellow (1982-1986)
 * Harold and Esther Edgerton Chair at MIT (1996-1998)
 * Midwest Mechanics Lecturer (2006-2007)
 * Chair American Physical Society, Division of Fluid Dynamics (2012)
 * Fellow, American Physical Society (2010)
 * Director, Center for Fluid Mechanics, Brown University (2020-Present)