Rate My Professor Jonathan Morrison

Professor Jonathan Morrison FREng is the Chair in Experimental Fluid Mechanics in the Department of Aeronautics at Imperial College London. He obtained his PhD from the University of Durham and joined the Imperial College faculty in 1991, where he has progressed to his current professorial position. Throughout his career, Morrison has focused on experimental investigations into turbulent flows, contributing significantly to the understanding and manipulation of fluid dynamics phenomena.

His research interests center on the fundamental physics of turbulence, including the instabilities that precipitate the transition to chaos and fully developed turbulence. Morrison's recent experimental studies have direct relevance to drag production, energy dissipation, and emissions in engineering fluid systems. He adopts a multidisciplinary strategy that fuses smart materials, advanced control theory, and core fluid mechanics principles to achieve active flow control, with particular emphasis on reducing aerodynamic drag to mitigate emissions in transportation. As a Royal Society Industry Fellow, he collaborates with QinetiQ on projects aimed at drag reduction for innovative airframe designs. Additionally, Morrison conceived and established the National Wind Tunnel Facility, creating a fair, merit-based system for access to UK wind tunnel infrastructure, addressing longstanding underinvestment in experimental aerodynamics facilities.

In 2024, his pioneering work was recognized by election to the Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering. His scholarly output includes highly influential papers such as "Further observations on the mean velocity distribution in fully developed pipe flow" (2004, 416 citations), "Eddy structure in turbulent boundary layers" (2000, 302 citations), "Scaling of the streamwise velocity component in turbulent pipe flow" (2004, 282 citations), "Low-dimensional dynamics of a turbulent axisymmetric wake" (2014, 144 citations), "Passive control of pressure fluctuations generated by separated flow" (1998, 135 citations), "Stochastic modelling and feedback control of bistability in a turbulent bluff body wake" (2016, 125 citations), "Pitot probe corrections in fully developed turbulent pipe flow" (2003, 110 citations), and "Transient growth instability cancelation by a plasma actuator array" (2010, 106 citations). These works underscore his impact on the field of turbulent boundary layer control and wake dynamics.