Professor Jun Zhang Elected APS Fellow, Cited for “His Elegant and Artful Experiments”

Professor Jun Zhang, a member of the NYU-ECNU Joint Research Institutes at NYU Shanghai, was recently elected Fellow of American Physical Society (APS). The fellowship announcement cited “his elegant and artful experiments” which, it states, “have moved fluid-structure interactions into the scientific mainstream, and which have inspired their study in physics, biology, engineering, geophysics, and applied mathematics.”

Jun Zhang is Professor of physics and mathematics at NYU Shanghai and New York University. Since 2001 he has been the co-director of the Applied Math Laboratory at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He is also a member of the NYU-ECNU Institute of Physics and Mathematics at NYU Shanghai. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.

Zhang’s research interests include the physics of fluids and complex systems, encompassing biomechanics and bio-locomotion (organismal swimming, walking and flying), geophysical fluids (thermal convection and continental dynamics), solid-on-solid friction, and self-organized phenomena at different scales.

For Zhang, moving from New York to Shanghai to join the newly-established NYU Shanghai, completed the full circle. He is now leading the brand-new fluid physics lab at NYU Shanghai. He has conducted numerous studies and published a wide range of interesting as well as influential articles. Among those are research on the sixth sense of fish, the invention of a new ratchet pump inspired by the flight of birds, and findings about how flying insects defy aerodynamic laws that apply to airplanes.