Background and Research Interests
Professor Fox joined Iowa State University as the Glenn Murphy Professor of Engineering in 1999, and was the Herbert L. Stiles Professor of Chemical Engineering from 2003-2012. He was promoted to Distinguished Professor of Engineering in 2010. Prior to joining ISU, Fox was an Associate Professor of Engineering at Kansas State University, and has held visiting professorships in Denmark, France, Italy, Switzerland and the Netherlands. From 1987-88, he was a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at LSGC in Nancy, France working in the area of chemical reaction engineering under the guidance of Prof. Jacques Villermaux. His numerous professional awards include a NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1992 and the ISU Outstanding Achievement in Research Award in 2007.  Professor Fox was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2007.  He is currently an Associate Scientist at the US-DOE Ames Laboratory, and Marie Curie Senior Fellow at the Ecole Centrale in Paris, France.

Professor Fox has made numerous ground-breaking contributions to the field of multiphase and reactive flow modeling.  The Fox group spearheaded many fundamental advances in the development of novel computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models to overcome specific scientific challenges faced in the chemical and petroleum industries.  He pioneered the use of in situ tabulation (ISAT) for efficiently handling complex chemistry in detailed multiphase reactor models, and developed powerful quadrature-based moment methods (DQMOM, CQMOM, EQMOM) for treating distribution functions (particle size, bubble size, etc.) required for CFD models of single and multiphase reactors.  The impact of Fox’s work extends far beyond chemical engineering and touches every technological area dealing with turbulent flow and chemical reactions (e.g., combustion, atmospheric science, nuclear fuel processing, etc.).  His book, Computational Models for Turbulent Reacting Flows, published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in 2003, offers an authoritative treatment of the field. His recent CUP book, Computational Models for Polydisperse Particulate and Multiphase Systems, provides a comprehensive treatment of CFD model for disperse multiphase flows.