Dr. Fazle Hussain is the Cullen Distinguished Professor and director of the Institute of Fluid Dynamics and Turbulence, in the mechanical engineering department at The University of Houston. Dr. Hussain is a world-renowned scientist in fluid dynamics with over 200 papers in prestigious journals. He has been a visiting scholar at Cambridge six times, the Indian Institute of Science at Bangalore, the Institute of Mechanics at Beijing, the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics at UCSB, and is the lifetime Moore Distinguished Scholar at Caltech and an honorary professor at Peking University.

Dr. Hussain currently serves on the board of The Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas, as the mechanical engineering chair of the National Academy of Engineering, and as chair of the Academy of Science of the Developing World. He is a Fellow of APS, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Dr. Hussain has received awards including the Freeman Scholar Award of ASME in 1984, the Fluid Dynamics Prize of APS in 1998, the Fluids Engineering Award of ASME in 2000, and the Fluid Dynamics Award of AIAA in 2002 for his groundbreaking work in fluid dynamics. Dr. Hussain is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

At Houston Methodist Research Institute, Dr. Hussain serves as the Dean of Engineering of the Council of Deans. In this capacity, he provides leadership, guidance and counsel for research and education.

The primary theme of Dr. Hussain’s research is the search for order in the disorder of turbulence. That is, underlying the complicated, seemingly random motion of turbulence, there is an organization. Dr. Hussain was one of the pioneers in recognizing that such organized motion is the key to understanding turbulence, and to controlling turbulent flows for technological benefit. For example, to design better engines and turbines, reduce drag and hence saving fuel in aircraft, and reduce the noise from jet engines. For applications like these and more, he has pursued experimental, numerical and theoretical studies of the basic mechanisms of turbulence.