This annual high profile lecture given by distinguished individuals in the area of Fluid Mechanics celebrates the opening of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Fluid Dynamics across Scales and the pioneering work in this area of Professor Sir James Lighthill FRS whilst at Imperial College.

The inaugural Imperial College Lighthill Lecture was given by Professor Stephen H. Davis on Friday 30 May 2014.

Watch the lecture

A full recording of the lecture, with an introduction by Professor Trevor Stewart, is available to watch below.

inaugural imperial college lighthill lecture 2014/

Forty years of moving contact lines

Professor Stephen H. Davis The mutual displacement of a liquid and a second fluid gives rise to non-standard fluid-mechanical issues as has been recognized since the early 1970's.

The lecture will follow the developments since that time to the present highlighting the crucial issues that have led to the present ability to match theoretical prediction with experimental observation on the macroscopic scale. Analytical, numerical, and experimental contributions will be detailed as will alternative theories to the hydrodynamic.

Speaker biography

Stephen H. Davis, McCormick School (Institute) Professor and Walter P. Murphy Professor of Applied Mathematics at Northwestern University, received all his degrees at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Ph.D. in Mathematics 1964).

He has been Research Mathematician at the RAND Corporation, Lecturer in Mathematics at Imperial College, London, and Assistant, Associate Professor and Full Professor of Mechanics at the Johns Hopkins University.

He was Editor of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics and is the Editor of Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics. He has authored over two hundred refereed technical papers in the fields of Fluid Mechanics and Materials Science, and has written a book “Theory of Solidification”.

He has twice been Chairman of the Division of Fluid Dynamics of the American Physical Society, is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is the 1994 recipient of the Fluid Dynamics Prize of the American Physical Society and the 2001 G. I. Taylor Medal of the Society of Engineering Science.