University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Pratap Vanka is Professor Emeritus and Research Professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering. He has pioneered several numerical algorithms including multigrid methods, Lattice Boltzmann methods, meshless techniques, GPU computing, and partially-parabolic methods. He has taught a graduate level CFD course at University of Illinois for 25 years, and continues to teach that course after taking Emeritus status. He is passionate about developing codes for CFD and heat transfer, and has developed more than 25 research level CFD codes since his graduate research at Imperial College. He worked for his Ph. D. with Professor D. B. Spalding (late), a pioneer in computational fluid dynamics and computational heat transfer. Pratap Vanka has published close to 170 papers in journals and reviewed technical conferences. He has received both teaching and research awards. He is a Life Fellow of ASME, and Associate Fellow of AIAA, and recipient of the ASME Freeman Scholar lecture award.

University of Notre Dame
Gretar Tryggvason is the Viola D. Hank professor at the University of Notre Dame and the chair of the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering. He received his PhD from Brown University in 1985 and was on the faculty of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor until 2000, when he moved to Worcester Polytechnic Institute as the head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He moved to the University of Notre Dame in 2010. Professor Tryggvason is well known for his contributions to computational fluid dynamics; particularly the development of methods for computations of multiphase flows and for pioneering direct numerical simulations of such flows. He served as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Computational Physics 2002-2015, is a fellow of APS, ASME and AAAS, and the recipient of several awards, including the 2012 ASME Fluids Engineering Award.

University of Illinois at Chicago
Farzad Mashayek is currently a Professor and Head of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Mashayek has conducted research on Eulerian-Lagrangian particle/droplet-laden turbulent flow modeling and simulation for more than two decades. His early work was focused on homogeneous turbulent flows. After conducting the first DNS of evaporating droplets in an incompressible isotropic flow, Mashayek was the first to simulate particle dispersion in compressible flows, and later extended the work to consider droplet evaporation in homogeneous isotropic and shear flows. Further extension of this work included chemical reaction and produced detail information of various mechanisms of droplet-turbulence interactions. His research group has also developed advanced stochastic models for RANS simulation of particle dispersion in turbulent flows. More recent work of Mashayek was directed towards development and implementation of advanced spectral element codes for non-homogeneous turbulent flow configurations. Mashayek spent the summers of 2007 and 2008 as a Summer Faculty Fellow at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) working on implementation and optimization of these spectral element codes on massively parallel supercomputers.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Caleb Brooks is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the department of Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering. His research interests include nuclear reactor thermal-hydraulics, validation of safety analysis codes and computational fluid dynamics codes, as well as, research and design of next generation reactor systems. Dr. Brooks received his Ph.D. from Purdue University where he worked in the Thermal-hydraulic and Reactor Safety Laboratory (TRSL). In 2013 he was the recipient of both the Purdue University ‘College of Engineering Outstanding Research Award’ and ‘College of Engineering Outstanding Service Award’.