Howard A. Stone

American engineer (born 1960)

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 became an Editor of the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics in 2021.

Stone 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 postdoctoral 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. His research on surfactants has important implications for the dispersal of hydrocarbon pollution in aquatic environments. In 2016 he published 54 papers in first class journals.

Stone is also committed to undergraduate education and outreach to the general public. In 1994 he received both the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Award and the Phi Beta Kappa teaching Prize, which are the only two teaching awards given to faculty in Harvard College. In 2000 he was named a Harvard College Professor for his contributions to undergraduate education. Currently he also serves as an Academic Athletic Fellow for the Princeton University women's basketball team. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2003. He was the first recipient of the most prestigious fluid mechanics prize, the Batchelor Prize 2008, for best research in fluid mechanics in the last ten years. Stone was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2009, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011, a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014, and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2022. In 2016, he was awarded the Fluid Dynamics Prize by the American Physical Society.