Jonathan J. L. Higdon, PhD, is the Dennis and Cathy Houston Professor in the Dept. of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Higdon has been on the Illinois faculty for 45 years. Higdon is a leader in computational fluid dynamics, the mechanics of complex fluids, geophysical fluid dynamics, and petroleum reservoir simulation. In addition to his tenure at Illinois, Higdon has held visiting professorships at the California Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins Univ., and served as a consultant for ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company. Higdon is a member of the Society of Rheology and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). His national service includes appointments to the NAE’s U.S. National Committee for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics and the NSF’s CAREER Panels. Early in his career, Higdon received an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, and in subsequent years has received numerous awards for excellence in teaching. He earned his BES and MSE from Johns Hopkins Univ., and PhD in applied mathematics and theoretical physics from Cambridge Univ., where he was a Winston Churchill Scholar and NSF Fellow. He completed his postdoctoral studies at Stanford Univ.