Emeritus Professor Peter Simpkins has died. Simpkins was a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and a University Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.
Peter Simpkins
Simpkins joined Syracuse University in 2002 and retired in 2007. His primary research interests were in applied mechanics, particularly fluid mechanics.
He began his distinguished engineering career at Handley Page Aircraft in his native England, where he worked as an apprentice. He was a scholar at the von Karman Institute in Belgium and a NATO Fellow at the California Institute of Technology. Simpkins earned a Ph.D. in aeronautics at Imperial College of Science and Technology in London.
He worked on ballistic missile research for AVCO Corp. in Boston before joining Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey. While there, he carried out research in electronic materials processing and fiber optics technology. Simpkins held numerous patents for his work in fiber optics, for which he was elected into the NAE in 1999. He also worked on several NASA review boards and was a reviewer for numerous journal articles.
In 2011, he was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society for his incisive analytical and experimental studies of two-phase flows, natural convection, and various aspects of electro-optical materials processing. He was also a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
