Rate My Professor Ricardo Garcia-Mayoral

Professor Ricardo Garcia-Mayoral is Professor of Fluid Mechanics in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge, where he joined in 2013. He belongs to the Energy, Fluids and Turbomachinery Division and the Fluids research group. Prior to his appointment, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Turbulence Research at Stanford University. He earned his PhD from the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid in 2011. Additionally, he serves as a Governing Body Fellow and Director of Studies at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.

His research centers on wall-bounded turbulence, with a particular emphasis on modifying and controlling turbulent flows using non-conventional surfaces such as ribbed, superhydrophobic, porous, rough, and canopy-like textures. This work aims to reduce drag in vehicles, pipelines, and naval applications, thereby improving fuel efficiency and lowering carbon emissions. Key areas include turbulence over rough walls, drag reduction by anisotropic fibre coatings, turbulence over poro-rough surfaces, canopy turbulence, active flow control of large scales, reduced-order models for surface textures, causality in wall turbulence, and turbulent drag reduction by riblets and superhydrophobic surfaces. He received the ERCofTAC Da Vinci Prize in 2012 for his PhD research on ribbed surfaces, recognized as the Best European Thesis in Fluid Mechanics. Notable publications include 'Hydrodynamic stability and breakdown of the viscous regime over riblets' (Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2011, cited over 300 times), collaborations on turbulent flows over superhydrophobic surfaces (2018), and analysis of anisotropically permeable surfaces for turbulent drag reduction (Physical Review Fluids, 2017). His work has garnered over 2400 citations on Google Scholar. He collaborates internationally, including with Stanford's Center for Turbulence Research on superhydrophobic surfaces for naval applications.