IAS Early Career Fellow Dr Peter Lewin-Jones wins prize at international conference

Dr Peter Lewin-Jones, current IAS Early Career Fellow, has won a prize (Young Scientist Award) for his conference presentation at the 1st International Symposium on Non-Equilibrium Transport Phenomena (netp.scimeeting.cn), which was held in Beijing in April 2025. This conference featured researchers from many countries across engineering, physics and maths who study problems in fluid dynamics where non-equilibrium effects matter, including the drag on satellites, the motion of pollution particles and nano-scale surfaces.

His research uses mathematical modelling to study the collision of liquid drops, such as raindrops. When two drops collide, they will either merge together or bounce apart. The problem of understanding when and why this occurs is crucial to understanding raindrop formation and disease transmission. When drops collide, a thin layer of the surrounding air is trapped between them, which can cause the drops to bounce rather than merge. Modelling this trapped air requires physics beyond those of classical fluid dynamics, and the mathematical models are so complex that they must be solved using high performance computing. This work has been published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics (doi:10.1017/jfm.2024.722).