Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Michael Amitay, James L. Decker ’45 Endowed Professor in Aerospace Engineering and director for the Center for Flow Physics and Control (CeFPaC), was elected as a fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society. The society is the only international professional body working to advance aeronautical art, science, and engineering around the world. With more than 25,000 members and corporate partners, the society is dedicated to moving research forward in the aerospace aviation and space communities through information sharing.

Amitay’s research interests are in the fields of experimental fluid mechanics, aerodynamics, and flow control with applications to aerial and ground vehicles. He conducts state-of-the-art experiments to understand the flow physics of 3D flow fields and the interaction of flow control actuators with these flows.

Amitay received his D.Sc. in 1994 from the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arizona (1994-1996) working on active control of heat transfer. From 1996-2003, he held several positions at Georgia Tech Research Institute and at Georgia Institute of Technology. He joined Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2003. He is also a fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). Amitay has over 225 journal and conference publications, four book chapters, three conference papers that were awarded “best technical paper” by ASME and AIAA, and nine U.S. patents.