College Honors Franklin Institute Award Winner

The College of Engineering welcomed the opportunity to honor Dr. D. Brian Spalding, the recipient of the 2010 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Mechanical Engineering and pioneer of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) applications, at a daylong CFD Symposium at Villanova during Franklin Institute Awards Week in April.

Nearly 100 engineers from academia and industry attended the daylong symposium, which featured an all-star lineup of CFD experts who discussed the history of CFD, as well as research updates on a wide range of its applications for aeronautics, planetary sciences, cardiovascular systems, and more.

The Franklin Institute Awards have been given annually for more than 185 years, honoring leading scientists and engineers, some of whom also later become Nobel Laureates.

According to the Franklin Institute, Dr. Spalding was selected as the 2010 honoree "for his seminal contributions to the computer modeling of fluid flow, creating the practice of computational fluid dynamics in industry, and paving the path for the widespread application of CFD to the design of objects from airplanes to heart valves." To read more about Dr. Spalding's background and the Franklin Institute Awards, visit www.fi.edu/franklinawards/.