Howard Stone, a pioneer in fluid dynamics, has been elected a member of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters, one of the nation’s newest learned societies.
Stone, the Neil A. Omenn ’68 University Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, was one of 60 new members honored in a ceremony at Decatur House in Washington, D.C. in November. He was cited for his research on fluid dynamics and its applications at the interface of engineering, chemistry, physics and biology.
Stone’s work on complex fluids has had a broad impact, including in medical technology, health and ecology, materials science, microfluidics, thin fluid films and colloid science. He has published nearly 700 scholarly articles dating back to the mid-1980s, and has been cited over 96,000 times. In the past year, Stone has helped describe the critical role that underground fungal networks play in the environment, and discovered a behavior in gels with implications for manufacturing and 3D printing. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Stone and colleagues made the first direct visualization of fluid flows from speaking, which produces and expels droplets of saliva into the air.
Formed in 2023, the American Academy of Sciences and Letters promotes “scholarship and outstanding achievement in the arts, sciences and learned professions,” according to an Academy press release. He is one of seven inductees from Princeton this year.
Stone is an associate faculty member in the Princeton Materials Institute, the Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute and the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and is a foreign member of the Royal Society of the United Kingdom. Stone received his doctorate from the California Institute of Technology and was the Vicky Joseph Professor of Engineering and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University before joining the Princeton faculty in 2009 as the Donald R. Dixon ’69 and Elizabeth W. Dixon Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.
