Prof. Suresh Menon has been selected by COE Dean Gary May after a college-wide search, and appointed by the Board of Regents for the position of the College of Engineering Hightower Professor.

Prof. Menon has made enormous contributions to the knowledge base in fluid mechanics, combustion and propulsion. The Hightower Professorship recognizes his accomplishments in the development of original computational methods applicable to a wide spectrum of combustion and fluid dynamics problems, and particularly for their impact on modeling and simulation of realistic operational systems.

The Hightowers have been an important family to Georgia Tech for more than 100 years.  William Harrison Hightower, Sr. earned a degree in textile engineering in 1909 while playing football for Coach John Heisman.  The fifth generation of the Hightower Family to attend Georgia Tech, Ann Louisa Hightower Brewton, is attending as a freshman this fall.

Prof. Menon earned his BS and MS in Aeronautical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology and his PhD in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Maryland.  He is a world-renowned expert in large-eddy simulation of turbulent reacting and non-reacting flows, and has developed unique simluation capabilities to investigate these processes in propulsion systems such as gas turbines, ramjet, scramjet and rocket engines.  He is the Director of the Computational Combustion Laboratory in the School of Aerospace Engineering at Georgia Tech.