Prof. Varghese holds the Ernest H. Cockrell Centennial Chair in Engineering and served as the Department Chair of Aerospace Engineering & Engineering Mechanics from 2009 to 2012. He has an international reputation in the area of combustion diagnostics and non-equilibrium flows. He was awarded a Fulbright Grant in Fall 1993 to apply laser diagnostics to hypersonic wind tunnels in France. In summer 1998 he was awarded the Boeing-A.D. Welliver Faculty Fellowship by the Boeing Company, and in Fall 1999 he was appointed Director of the Center for Aeromechanics Research. He was a member of the National Technical Committee on Aerodynamic Measurement Technology of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics from 1994-2010. He received the Department Teaching Award in Spring 2001, the Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company Award for Excellence in Engineering Teaching in Spring 2003, and was elected to the Academy of Distinguished Teachers at the University of Texas in 2005. In February 2012 he was selected Professor of the Year by the Senate of College Councils. In May 2013 he was awarded a Rector’s Fellowship by the University of New South Wales in Canberra, Australia and was a Visiting Professor at that institution in summer 2013. He won a Moncrief Research Fellowship from UT for 2015-2016 and was awarded The University of Texas System Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award in August 2016. In 2018-19 he served as UT’s representative at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. He serves on the International Advisory Committee of the International Symposium on Rarefied Gas Dynamics.
Dr. Varghese’s research focuses on understanding the basic molecular processes occurring in non-equilibrium flows. This is an inter-disciplinary field, requiring a synthesis of physics and chemistry with fluid mechanics, heat transfer, and thermodynamics. He applies his work to the study of hypersonic and rarefied flows, plasmas, and combustion. Dr. Varghese has established a laser diagnostics laboratory for experimental studies in combustion and plasma discharges. Together with Prof. Goldstein he has a very active program in planetary scale simulations of rarefied flows, and he has developed a novel technique for accurate solutions of the Boltzmann equation. His research publications have been extensively referenced and a recent search showed over 1600 citations of his work on the Web of Science Citation Index, and over 4100 citations on Google Scholar. Since he joined The University of Texas at Austin in 1983 his share of externally funded research grants is over $11 million. He is currently the Experimental Team Lead for the $16.5 million PSAAP3 Project at UT Austin on Exascale Predictive Simulation of Inductively Coupled Plasma Torches. He is co-inventor on six US patents (Nos. 6778269, 8111394, 8373855, 8384894, 8675191, and 9664561) related to applications of Raman spectroscopy.