Rate My Professor Oliver Buxton

Professor Oliver Buxton is Professor of Fluid Mechanics in the Department of Aeronautics within the Faculty of Engineering at Imperial College London. He completed his PhD at Imperial College London in 2011, with a thesis entitled 'The Fine Scale Features of Turbulent Shear Flow' that won the ERCOFTAC Da Vinci Competition in 2010. Prior to his appointment at Imperial, he held postdoctoral positions, including a Doctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin's Flowfield Imaging Lab and a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from 2011 to 2013. Buxton joined Imperial College London as a Lecturer in the Department of Aeronautics in 2013, was promoted to Reader in Experimental Fluid Mechanics in 2021, and advanced to Professor thereafter.

Buxton's research specializes in experimental fluid mechanics, focusing on turbulence physics, including entrainment across turbulent interfaces, multiscale coherent structures in shear flows, wind turbine wake dynamics, and turbulence interactions with scalars and droplets in applications such as offshore wind farms and cloud physics. He utilizes advanced laser diagnostic techniques like Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) and Planar Laser-Induced Fluorescence (PLIF), often in conjunction with direct numerical simulations. His publications have amassed over 1,440 citations on Google Scholar, with notable works including 'Turbulent entrainment into a cylinder wake from a turbulent background' (Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2020), 'Amplification of enstrophy in the far field of an axisymmetric turbulent jet' (Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2010), 'A robust post-processing method to determine skin friction in turbulent boundary layers from the velocity profile' (Experiments in Fluids, 2015), and 'The triple decomposition of a fluctuating velocity field in a multiscale flow' (Physics of Fluids, 2015). Buxton has received major awards and funding, such as the EPSRC Fellowship in 2020 for optimizing wind farm layouts, an ERC Starting Grant in 2023, and a contribution to the NASA Group Achievement Award in 2025 for Mars helicopter research. He chairs conferences like the EUROMECH Colloquium 669 on turbulent wind-farm dynamics in 2026 and presents public lectures on turbulence.