Beverley J. McKeon is a physicist and aerospace engineer specializing in fluid dynamics, and in particular in turbulent flows near walls.[1][2] She was Theodore von Kármán Professor of Aeronautics at the California Institute of Technology.[3] Currently she is a professor in the Department of Mechanical EngineeringatStanford University.
McKeon is originally from the Surrey, England, the daughter of a flight engineer.[2] She earned bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Cambridge in 1995 and 1996, respectively. She went to Princeton University for graduate study in mechanical and aerospace engineering, earning a second master's degree in 1999 and completing her Ph.D. in 2003,[4] under the supervision of Alexander Smits.[5]
After postdoctoral research as a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellow at Imperial College London,[5] she joined the California Institute of Technology faculty in 2006. She was promoted to professor in 2011 and was named von Kármán Professor in 2017.[4]
In 2016, McKeon was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), after a nomination by the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics, "for experimental and theoretical contributions to advancing the understanding of wall turbulence and for elegant interdisciplinary approaches to modeling and flow manipulation".[6] In 2020, she became a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.[7]
