Rate My Professor Howard Stone

Howard A. Stone is the Neil A. Omenn ’68 University Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. He earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Davis, in 1982, and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1988. After postdoctoral positions at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, Stone joined the faculty of Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in 1989. There, he rose to become the Vicky Joseph Professor of Engineering and Applied Mathematics and was appointed Harvard College Professor in 2000 in recognition of his contributions to undergraduate education. In July 2009, he relocated to Princeton University as the Donald R. Dixon ’69 and Elizabeth W. Dixon Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. In October 2024, Princeton named him University Professor, the institution’s highest faculty distinction.

Stone’s research focuses on fluid dynamics, particularly problems involving low-Reynolds-number flows that arise at the interfaces of engineering, chemistry, physics, and biology. His laboratory integrates theory, computer simulations, modeling, and experiments to investigate microfluidics, multiphase flows, electrokinetics, flows with bacteria and biofilms, and complex fluids. Notable applications include biological fluid dynamics in microchannels and fluid mechanics related to virus transmission during speech. Key publications encompass the highly influential review “Engineering flows in small devices: microfluidics toward a lab-on-a-chip” (Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, 2004) and recent articles such as “On the self-similarity of unbounded viscous Marangoni flows” (Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2024) and “Building on-chip cytoskeletal circuits via branched microtubule networks” (PNAS, 2024). Stone has garnered major awards including the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, the first G.K. Batchelor Prize in Fluid Dynamics (2008), the American Physical Society Fluid Dynamics Prize (2016), election to the National Academy of Engineering (2009), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2011), the National Academy of Sciences (2014), the American Philosophical Society (2022), and the Royal Society as Foreign Member (2022). He serves as Editor of the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics since 2021, was Associate Editor of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics for ten years, chairs editorial boards for Physical Review Fluids, Langmuir, and Soft Matter, and previously chaired the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics.