The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) presented Ben Zinn, the David S. Lewis, Jr. Chair and Regents Professor at the School of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, with its 2014 Reed Aeronautics Award. The organization, with more than 35,000 members from 80 countries, recognized Zinn for his “extensive and fundamental contributions to aerospace propulsion and power technologies, research, education, education literature and workforce development.”

Zinn played professional soccer in Israel before moving to the States to attend college. Following an undergraduate degree received from New York University and a master’s from Stanford University, Zinn earned a Ph.D. in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton in 1966. He joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 1965, where he continues to teach and conduct research on combustion. During his tenure Zinn created a highly respected combustion program, which is housed on the Atlanta campus in the Ben T. Zinn Combustion Laboratory.

Zinn’s research fields include control of combustion processes; combustion instabilities in rocket motors, ramjets, jet engine and gas turbines; oscillatory flame phenomena; reacting flows; and acoustics and pulse combustion. He has won additional awards from AIAA and has been honored with the 2006 American Society of Mechanical Engineers Westinghouse Gold Medal and the 2002 Combustion Institute’s Alfred C. Egerton Gold Medal.