Congrats to Julio!

It has been a minute since we’ve updated the site — and we owe belated congratulations to Julio Chavez Dorado on completion of his Masters thesis this summer!  Julio was a valuable member of the JETlab for the past 2 years on a Fulbright scholarship.  His work on surface velocimetry in our outdoor flume was tricky, but he was determined throughout and learned a ton about image processing along the way.  This past month, Julio traded Austin for Seattle to begin his PhD at the University of Washington!  We will miss him dearly, but are so glad he’s staying in Fluid Mechanics so that we can continue to rendezvous at conferences in the coming years.

With Julio’s graduation, the JETlab is down to 3 PhD students (all of whom have passed their qualifying exams, WOOHOO!) and 1 Masters student, but we’ve gained several wonderful new undergraduate members!  I realize we missed doing a formal post to welcome Po-Chen to our crew — he had a staggered start, due to international travel restrictions and Visa delays thanks to the pandemic, but he’s been in Austin since January already and we are so glad to work with him.  I am happy to report that we’ve finally recovered to what feels like “normal” lab operations for the first time since the pandemic shutdown in March 2020. I am also thrilled that we are allowed to have undergraduate researchers in the lab again — it was such a loss having those personnel restrictions in place.  Of course we acknowledge the safety concerns, but it really stank.  Hopefully soon it will all be a distant memory.  We are still doing many zoom meetings, but all get to cross paths in the lab and for occasional celebratory dinners.

In the mean time, experiments are going strong – fluorescent dyes all over the place to visualize stratified layers in turbulence mixing experiments, to visualize plumes to develop remote sensing techniques, and much more.  We have several in-person conferences coming up this Fall for the first time since winter 2019/2020, and can’t wait to see our friends and colleagues in 3D again!