Dr. Joseph Oefelein is a professor in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He joined the faculty at Georgia Tech. in the fall of 2017, after a 17-year career at Sandia National Laboratories, Combustion Research Facility, where he served as a distinguished member of technical staff. Prior to this, he served as a research associate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. He is actively engaged in research on a broad range of topics in simulation and modeling of advanced propulsion, power, and related systems. His expertise is interdisciplinary, with focus on the theory and analysis of complex fluid flows where turbulence interacts with a multitude of strongly coupled fluid dynamic, thermodynamic, transport, chemical, multiphase, and/or heat transfer processes. He is an expert in the area of supercritical fluid phenomena and has extensive experience in the development and application of the Large Eddy Simulation (LES) technique, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), and high-performance massively-parallel computing. He is active in a number of professional societies including The Combustion Institute, American Physical Society (APS), American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE). He is an associate editor for the Journal of Propulsion and Power, and a member and past chair of the AIAA Propellants and Combustion Technical Committee. He also serves on the editorial board of The Combustion Institute and as an associate editor for the Proceedings of The Combustion Institute. Dr. Oefelein has been a principal investigator for a broad range of sponsored research projects funded by the United States  Department of Energy, Department of Defense (e.g., AFOSR, AFRL, DARPA, SERDP), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (e.g., MSFC, LaRC), and National Science Foundation. He has also established significant collaborations with key industry leaders in the aerospace and transportation sectors. The portfolio of projects involves research across a broad range of topics while also providing a crucial link between basic and applied research.

Teaching Interests

Professor Oefelein’s teaching interests encompass fundamental and advanced topics in aerospace engineering with a focus on combustion, propulsion, and fluid dynamics. He is dedicated to instructing both undergraduate and graduate students, emphasizing the underlying physical principles and practical applications within energy conversion and propulsion systems. His teaching approach aims to integrate theory and experiment, fostering a comprehensive understanding of aerospace propulsion phenomena.

Research Interests

Professor Oefelein’s research centers on combustion and propulsion sciences, particularly involving reactive flow dynamics and multiphase flow physics. His work includes high-fidelity simulations and experimental investigations to understand turbulent combustion, thermochemical processes, and fluid-structure interactions relevant to aerospace propulsion systems. This research seeks to advance knowledge of energy conversion mechanisms and contribute to the development of efficient and clean propulsion technologies.

Research

Lab/Collaborations:

• Ben T. Zinn Combustion Laboratory

Disciplines:

• Propulsion & Combustion

AE Multidisciplinary Research Areas:

• Large-Scale Computations, Data, and Analytics
• Sustainable Transportation and Energy Systems

Education

• Ph.D. Mechanical Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, 1997
• M.S. Mechanical Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, 1992
• B.S. Mechanical Engineering (Highest Honors), Rutgers University, 1989

Recent Publications

• Preethi V. Mysore, Joseph Oefelein, Evaluation of Wall Modeling Approaches for Transition of Hypersonic Boundary Layers, 2026
   DOI: 10.2514/6.2026-0944.
• Dhruv Purushotham, Chang Hyeon Lim, Adam M. Steinberg, Devesh Ranjan, Joseph C. Oefelein, Joint numerical and experimental investigation of turbulent mixing in a supercritical CO2 shear layer, Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2025 DOI: 10.1017/jfm.2025.71.
• Kyle A. Schau, Joseph C. Oefelein. Numerical Analysis of Wave Characteristics in a Methane-Oxygen Rotating Detonation Engine. AIAA Journal, 2022.
• Umesh Unnikrishnan, Joseph C. Oefelein, Vigor Yang. Subgrid modeling of the filtered equation of state with application to real-fluid turbulent mixing at supercritical pressures. Physics of Fluids, 2022.
• Guilhem Lacaze, Thomas Schmitt, Anthony Ruiz, Joseph C. Oefelein. Comparison of energy-, pressure- and enthalpy-based approaches for modeling supercritical flows. Computers & Fluids, 2019.

Satish Kumar is currently an Associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. He joined Georgia Tech in 2009 as an Assistant Professor. Prior, he worked at IBM Corporation where he was responsible for the thermal management of electronic devices. Kumar received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and M.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette in 2007. He received his M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge in 2003 and B.Tech. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati in 2001. His research interests are in electro-thermal transport in carbon nanotube, graphene, and 2D materials based electronic devices, AlGaN/GaN transistors, thermal management, and thermo-electric coolers. He is author or co-author of over 70 journal or conference publications. His contributions to his research field have been recognized by Purdue Research Foundation Fellowship in 2005, 1969 Teaching Fellow from Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning Center at Georgia Tech, 2012 Summer Faculty Fellow from Air Force Research Lab, 2014 Sigma Xi Young Faculty Award, and 2014 DARPA Young Faculty Award.

Dr. Akanksha Menon is an Assistant Professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. Prior to this, she was a Rosenfeld Postdoctoral Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she performed research on hybrid membrane-thermal desalination processes using solar energy, and she also contributed to the development of thermal energy storage materials. Dr. Menon completed her Ph.D. at Georgia Tech, where she focused on developing semiconducting polymers and new device architectures for thermoelectric energy harvesting. She holds a bachelor's degree from Texas A&M University at Qatar, as well as a master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech.

Her research group at Georgia Tech is working on technologies for the water-energy nexus.

Dr. Mazumdar started at the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech in January of 2019 and currently has a courtesy appointment with the Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering. She graduated with her Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed a postdoctoral appointment at Sandia National Laboratories in the Diagnostic Science and Engineering group. Her research interests include the design of new diagnostic techniques and sensor systems for studying combustion, multiphase flows, hypersonic flows, and energetic materials. Her group utilizes new composite sensing materials, optical diagnostics, magnetostatics, and system identification methods to study these complex physical phenomena.

Ben Emerson completed his Ph. D. in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech in August, 2013. Since then, Ben has worked as a Research Engineer at the Ben T. Zinn Combustion Lab at Georgia Tech. Ben’s research portfolio includes projects on combustion instabilities, alternative fuels, and combustion system R&D with a core focus and motivation of cleaner combustion. Ben’s research primarily consists of three core competencies, which are experimental combustion system development, combustor diagnostics, and combustion theory and modeling. Ben’s combustion system development work spans a wide variety of applications, from small lab-scale burners to combustor rigs that test full-scale gas turbine combustor hardware. His combustor diagnostics work encompasses the state of the art optical diagnostic techniques for reacting flow field measurements and imaging, and aims to implement those techniques in both laboratory-scale and large-scale rig tests. Finally, Ben’s combustion theory and modeling work is geared towards analysis of experimental datasets, development of reduced-order engineering tools, and the development of a suite of hydrodynamic stability analysis tools. Together, these core competencies form the pillars of Ben’s research, which facilitates the design of cleaner-burning combustion systems.

Marta Hatzell is a professor of mechanical engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to starting at Georgia Tech in August of 2015, she was a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Material Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign. During her post doc, she worked in the Braun Research Group on research at the interface between colloid science and electrochemistry. She completed her Ph.D. at Penn state University in the Logan Research Group. Her Ph.D. explored environmental technology for energy generation and water treatment. During graduate school she was an NSF and PEO Graduate Research Fellow. 

Currently her research group focuses on exploring the sustainable catalysis and separations, with applications spanning from solar energy conversion to desalination. She is an active member of the American Chemical Society, the Electrochemical Society, ASEEP, and ASME. Hatzell was awarded the NSF Early CAREER award in 2019 for her work on distributed solar-fertilizers, attended the 2019 US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium through the National Academy of Engineering, and was awarded the 2020 Sloan Research Fellowships in Chemistry.