Nicholas Ouellette

Nick Ouellette is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University and leads the Environmental Complexity Lab. He is broadly interested in the behavior of complex systems far from equilibrium, with a particular focus on dynamical self-organization. He seeks both to understand the physical principles governing the spontaneous emergence of low-dimensional structure in high-dimensional systems and to harness this self-organization for engineering applications. His research interests include turbulent flows in two and three dimensions (in both homogeneous and stratified fluids); the transport of inertial, anisotropic, and active particles in turbulence; fluid-driven erosion of granular beds and sediment transport; quantitative measurements of collective behavior in insect swarms and bird flocks; and emergent, self-organized structure and dynamics in cities.
 
Ouellette is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Before joining the Stanford faculty, he spent seven years on the faculty in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Yale University. He earned a B.A. in Physics and Computer Science from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. in Physics from Cornell University, and held postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (with Eberhard Bodenschatz) and in the Physics Department at Haverford College (with Jerry Gollub). He teaches courses in fluid mechanics and nonlinear dynamics, and has won teaching awards at both Stanford and Yale.