Rate My Professor Nek Sharan

Nek Sharan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Auburn University, a position he has held since August 2021. He earned a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in December 2016, with his dissertation on “Time-stable high-order finite difference methods for overset grids” advised by Professors Daniel J. Bodony and Carlos Pantano. He also holds dual M.Tech. and B.Tech. degrees in Aerospace Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, awarded in August 2011 for his work on “Numerical Simulation of Axisymmetric Jets” under Professor Avijit Chatterjee. Sharan's prior appointments include Postdoctoral Research Associate at Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Computational Physics and Methods Group (2019–2021), Postdoctoral Scholar at California Institute of Technology’s Graduate Aerospace Laboratories (2016–2019), and earlier roles as Graduate Research Assistant at UIUC, Analyst at Procter & Gamble, Research Assistant at IIT Bombay, and Assistant Engineer at FH Aachen University of Applied Sciences.

Sharan’s research focuses on computational fluid dynamics, developing high-order numerical methods for hyperbolic systems, direct numerical and large-eddy simulations of turbulent flows, and modeling fluid-structure interactions in high-speed compressible flows. He directs the Computational Fluids Group at Auburn and has secured significant funding, including a $290,000 National Science Foundation grant in 2025 to advance tools for simulating transonic, supersonic, and hypersonic flows with applications to aircraft design, infrastructure fortification, and space propulsion. As principal investigator, he co-leads a U.S. Department of Defense DEPSCoR project with Vrishank Raghav to study airflow impacts on hovering rotor blades over inclined surfaces, aiming to enhance rotorcraft safety by mitigating brownouts and whiteouts. Key publications feature “High-order dimensionally-split Cartesian cut-cell method for non-dissipative schemes” and “Time stability of strong boundary conditions in finite-difference schemes for hyperbolic systems” both in 2022 (Journal of Computational Physics and SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis, respectively), “Investigation of high-pressure turbulent jets using direct numerical simulation” (Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2021), and “Turbulent shear-layer mixing: initial conditions, and direct-numerical and large-eddy simulations” (Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2019). His scholarship has garnered over 175 citations, reflecting impact in high-fidelity aerodynamic modeling.