Howard Alvin Stone (born January 19, 1960 ) is the Donald R. Dixon '69 and Elizabeth W. Dixon Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. His field of research is in fluid mechanics, chemical engineering and complex fluids.
He completed his undergraduate studies at University of California at Davis and earned his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology under the direction of L. Gary Leal. He joined Princeton in 2009 after twenty years of professorship at the School of Engineering at Harvard University, and after spending one year as a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University. His research has been concerned with a variety of fundamental problems in fluid motions dominated by viscosity, so-called low Reynolds number flows, and has frequently featured a combination of theory, computer simulation and modeling, and experiments to provide a quantitative understanding of the flow phenomenon under investigation.
Stone's studies have been directed toward heat transfer and mass transfer problems involving convection, diffusion and surface reactions. He has made contributions to a wide range of problems involving effects of surface tension, buoyancy, fluid rotation, and surfactants. He has also studied problems concerning the flow of lipid bilayers and monolayers, and has investigated the motions of particles suspended in such interfacial layers. This research area is actively pursued by researchers at the interface of chemistry, physics and engineering. He is the recipient of the most prestigious fluid mechanics prize, the Batchelor Prize 2008, for best research in fluid mechanics in the last ten years.
Some of the world’s most accomplished leaders from academia, business, public affairs, the humanities, and the arts have been elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Howard Stone, Howard A., Donald R. Dixon ’69 and Elizabeth W. Dixon Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering is part of the Class of 2011 inductees.
"Dynamic self-assembly of magnetized, millimetre-sized objects rotating at a liquid–air interface", Nature 405, 1033-1036 (2000)