Jacqueline O’Connor, who graduated with her Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering in May 2012, has accepted an appointment to the faculty at the Pennsylvania State University to begin in August of 2013.   Her work in combustion, under the supervision of Prof. Tim Lieuwen, addresses issues of combustion instability in annular gas turbine combustors.  Her dissertation, “Response of a Swirl-Stabilized Flame to Transverse Acoustic Excitation,” included some of the first work using high-speed particle image velocimetry (PIV) for a highly complex, reacting flow field.  

 While at Georgia Tech, Dr. O’Connor was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow and received a number of awards, including the AIAA Orville and Wilbur Wright Graduate award and an Amelia Earhart Fellowship.  She was named the 2007 Georgia Tech Graduate Woman of Distinction, and the ASME-IGTI Fellowship.  She will be joining the faculty as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering at Penn State in August 2013 after the completion of her post-doctoral appointment at the Combustion Research Facility at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, CA.  Before completing her Ph.D., Dr. O’Connor earned a B.S. in Aeronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006 and a M.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2009.