Seongkyu Lee and Ben Shaw Elected 2022 AIAA Associate Fellows
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Associate Professor Seongkyu Lee and Professor Ben Shaw were elected associate fellows by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).
Being elected an associate fellow recognizes those who have made significant accomplishments in the field of aeronautics or astronautics, through leading important work, doing original work of outstanding merit or making exceptional contributions to the arts, sciences or technology of aeronautics or astronautics.
Lee and Shaw were inducted at the annual AIAA SciTech Forum in January. They join their colleagues Steve Robinson, Nesrin Sarigul-Klijn and Case van Dam as the department’s five AIAA associate fellows, along with AIAA fellows Mohamed Hafez and Ron Hess.
Lee is known for his work in rotorcraft aerodynamics and aeroacoustics, with an emphasis on urban air mobility (UAM). UAM is an emerging field that promises short rotorcraft flights carrying passengers and cargo as a new method of transportation in urban environments. His group uses computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations to simulate and predict the noise of these crafts and recommend ways to reduce it.
The group’s rotorcraft broadband noise prediction tool UCD-QuietFly has been adopted by many universities and companies in the UAM field. His research has been supported by NASA, the U.S. Army, Hyundai Motor Company, Supernal, Caltrans, the National Science Foundation and the Hellman Foundation.
He received his B.S. at Pusan National University in Korea, his M.S. at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and his Ph.D. at Pennsylvania State University. He worked as a research engineer at GE Global Research until joining UC Davis in 2015. Since then, he has been the recipient of the UC Davis Hellman Fellowship, the UC Davis Graduate Program Advising and Mentorship Award and the best paper award from the Vertical Flight Society (VFS).
“I am very honored and humbled to be elected an AIAA Associate Fellow,” said Lee. “This recognition means a lot to me since I value and support the role AIAA plays in advancing aerospace engineering and educating the next-generation of engineers and scientists. It also provides me tremendous motivation, momentum and responsibility to continue to contribute to the community.”
Shaw is known for his teaching in thermodynamics, combustion, fluid dynamics, heat transfer and experimental methods, and he served as the department’s vice chair for undergraduate studies from 2013-2019. He and his group have studied droplet combustion aboard the International Space Station, in drop towers and in his laboratory at UC Davis, as well as the detection of nitrate ions in groundwater with UV spectroscopy. His research has been supported by NASA and the NSF.
Shaw received his B.S. and M.S. at Colorado State University and his Ph.D. at Princeton University. He worked as a postdoctoral scholar at UC San Diego and an assistant professor at the University of Connecticut before joining UC Davis in 1991. Since then, he has been named an American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) fellow, won the Top Discovery Award from the American Astronautical Society and published a textbook, Uncertainty Analysis of Experimental Data with R, in 2017.