Mitchell D. Smooke, a specialist in computational combustion, has been appointed the Strathcona Professor of Mechanical Engineering by vote of the Yale Corporation.
Professor Smooke is the first person to hold the endowed chair in more than three decades; the last Strathcona Professor was Newman Arnold Hall, who held the post 1958-64. The professorship was established in 1914 to support instruction in civil and mechanical engineering.
In addition to computational combustion, Professor Smooke's other research interests are chemical vapor deposition, numerical solution of ordinary and partial differential equations, large-scale scientific computation and scattering theory. He is the editor of one book, "Reduced Kinetic Mechanisms and Asymptotic Approximations for Methane-Air Flames," and has published numerous papers on the computational structure of flames and other topics. He has lectured widely at scientific meetings and workshops throughout the world and has held visiting professorships at Australia's Sydney University, Holland's Katholieke Universiteit and the Ecole Centrale in Chatenay- Malabry, France.
Professor Smooke joined the Yale faculty in 1984 as an assistant professor of mechanical engineering after serving as a staff scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in California. He became an associate professor in 1986, when he also assumed his current position as director of undergraduate studies in mechanical engineering. He also serves as a member of the University's Research Center for Scientific Computation.
A member of the Combustion Institute, the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics SIAM and the American Mathematical Society SIGNUM, among other professional organizations, Professor Smooke has served on various technical boards. These include the Army Research Office's panel on nitramine propellants, the National Science Foundation's Review Committee for Presidential Young Investigators, SIAM's organizing committee for the biannual meetings in computational combustion, and the program committee of the International Combustion Symposium. He has received several honors for his work, including a John F. Enders Research Grant from Yale, a Sandia National Laboratories Technical Achievement award and the distinction of being listed among "American Men and Women of Science."