New Fluids Ed list manager: David Mays

[Jean Hertzberg]

Dear Colleagues

I am happy to introduce David Mays, a Civil Engineering professor from the University of Colorado Denver. He is bravely taking on the management of this list. Please support him by helping him grow the list: invite the fluids-teaching faculty at your institution to subscribe, and publicize it at conferences. Just send their emails to David and he'll add them.

I've been retired for 10 months now, and am loving it. As a going-away gift, I offer you this archive of my 25 years of teaching undergraduate fluids to Mechanical Engineering students: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Pm_D5a-bnOu5s5sBksDBIQ8uczyLFOK8/view?usp=sharing

It includes homework and exam problems and solutions from myself and my co-instructors. Many are problems I've stolen and adapted from a range of textbooks, but in recent years I've been more creative, writing problems from scratch. I've also included the lecture notes from the last time I taught it - there are a number of active learning strategies in there; clicker questions, think-pair-share, etc. 

The class project was designed to be easy to administer to large (80+) sections of students. It employs peer assessment, and critique is explicitly taught using Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process.

Community is so important these days, and I want to thank you all for being part of this one. I am grateful for all your contributions.

Warm regards

Jean

Jean Hertzberg

Professor Emeritus

Department of Mechanical Engineering

University of Colorado Boulder

https://jeanbizhertzberg.com

 

[Mays, David]

Colleagues,

 

Thanks for the introduction, Jean, and thanks for your trust—and the trust of the FluidsEd community—in my stewardship!

 

Perhaps I might begin with my fluid mechanics biosketch. I first studied fluid mechanics as a 4^th year student at Penn in 1994/95, and I found it to be one of those courses, like high school physics, that left me seeing the world differently. I would even compare it to 1^st grade with Miss Whaley when I learned to read: After learning to read one finds it impossible to see a string of characters without reading the word (or at least trying). After learning fluid mechanics one finds it impossible to see the world without it.

 

The technical applications of fluid mechanics are endless, and I think the folks on this list might also agree that, beyond the technical applications, there is also abundant beauty. This beauty has been shown many times, not least through Jean’s flow visualization course at CU Boulder. And I would suggest that fluid mechanics goes even deeper: The air we breathe. The tears we cry in moments of joy and pain. The very blood in our veins. Our technical specialty is also the stuff of life.

 

It has been my privilege to teach undergraduate fluid mechanics for civil engineers at CU Denver since 2005, so I am wrapping up my 21^st year and looking forward to the next 21 (an aspiration not a guarantee). My class CVEN-3313 Fluid Mechanics is closer to the applied end of the spectrum. My research group studies environmental hydrology in general and chaotic advection in porous media specifically, which may be closer to the theoretical end of the spectrum (at least among groundwater researchers). Fluid mechanics is a big tent with plenty of space for different perspectives.

 

I am active in a number of technical organizations (including AEESP, AGU, and InterPore) but, at least thus far, not in the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics (DFD). I would like the long-standing connection between FluidsEd and DFD to continue, so if you are active in both, and you would like to serve as an informal liaison between FluidsEd and DFD, please let me know.

 

Best wishes to all as we wrap up the current semester and thanks again, Jean. Happy to carry the baton.

 

Regards,

David

 

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David C. Mays, P.E., Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Department of Civil Engineering and Construction

University of Colorado Denver

+1-303-315-7570

david...@ucdenver.edu

https://engineering.ucdenver.edu/dmays

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he, him, his

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From: 'Jean Hertzberg' via Fluids Education <fluids-e...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Friday, April 10, 2026 5:58 PM
To: Fluids Education List <fluids-e...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [FluidsEd] New Fluids Ed list manager: David Mays

 

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