At the April 2021 Mines Board of Trustees meeting, Dr. Owen Hildreth and Dr. Nils Tilton were awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor.
Dr. Owen Hildreth received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, San Diego in 2002 and worked for five years as a mechanical engineer designing consumer products. In 2012 received his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology under the supervision of Prof. C. P. Wong. His Ph.D. research identified the mechanism for catalyst motion in metal assisted chemical etching (MacEtch) for applications in 3D nanofabrication. His current research areas focus on additive manufacturing (nm to cm scales); mass transport, reaction kinetics, and interface design in reactive inks for stretchable electronics, photovoltaics, and microfluidic devices; sensitization kinetics, microstructure evolution, dilution, and corrosion of metals fabricated using Powder Bed Fusion (PBF) and Directed Energy Deposition (DED) technologies.
Dr. Nils Tilton’s expertise is in theoretical and computational fluid mechanics with an emphasis on hydrodynamic stability and flow through porous media. He received his Ph.D. in 2009 from McGill University, after which he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Aix-Marseille (2009-2011) and the University of Maryland (2011-2014). His research focuses on developing accurate analytical and numerical models of membrane filtration, carbon dioxide sequestration, and flow control for drag reduction. These applications play central roles in the water-energy-climate nexus, as well as the food, pharmaceutical, and petroleum sectors. Dr. Tilton’s numerical work focuses on spectral methods, fractional step methods, and multi-domain methods. His analytical work focuses on perturbation methods and volume-averaged models of flow through porous media.