Bio:
Jason Hearst is a Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. His primary research activities are centred around the generation of bespoke turbulent flows using active turbulence generating grids and investigating how turbulence influences other canonical and environmental fluids problems. His team is primarily funded via the European Research Council (Starting Grant, GLITR), Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (Post-doctoral fellow, Dr. Yi Hui Tee, InMyWaves) and the Research Council of Norway (FRIPRO, WallMix; Knowledge Building Project, reSail). Jason Hearst earned his PhD in 2015 from the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (Canada), and then worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Southampton (UK) with Prof. Bharath Ganapathisubramani. He moved to NTNU in 2017 as an Associate Professor and was promoted to Professor in 2023. He has been on sabbatical since August 2024, first at the University of Oxford and now from January 2025 he is at the University of Toronto.
Bio:
Laura Villafañe is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research explores a wide range of fluid dynamic problems, with particular interest on turbulent and particle-laden flows, and on the development of data analysis tools and non-intrusive diagnostics, including non-conventional flow diagnostics such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging. She graduated on Aerospace Engineering at the
Polytechnic University of Madrid, completed her Ph.D at the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics, Belgium, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Engineer at the Center for Turbulence Research at Stanford University prior to joining the faculty at UIUC in 2019. She is the recipient of three NASA Early-Stage-Innovation Awards for plume-surface interactions and parachute fluid and structural mechanics. Laura was elected Young Observer to the US National Committee for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics in 2024, and AIAA Associate Fellow Class of 2025.