Career
He received his bachelor (1960) and master (1962) degrees from the University of Melbourne and his Doctor of Philosophy degree (1965) in Aeronautics from Imperial College, London. He worked in the Aeronautical Research Laboratories, Melbourne (1962-1963, and 1965-1967), and in the Physics Department of the Australian National University (1967-1980), with a sabbatical year as a Humboldt Fellow in Darmstadt, Germany, 1974.
In 1980 he accepted an offer to head the Institute for Experimental Fluid Mechanics of the Deutsche Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt in Göttingen, Germany.
He left Germany in 1987 to serve as the director of GALCIT. During his time at GALCIT he oversaw the construction of three large facilities: the T5 hypervelocity shock tunnel, the John Lucas Adaptive-Wall Wind Tunnel, and a supersonic Ludwieg tube. He has made contributions in gasdynamics, notably Mach reflection and effects of dissociation, in separated flows, and in wind tunnel technology.
He was elected as a foreign member to the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences in 1991 and as a foreign associate to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997. 1988 ICAS von Karman Award, International Cooperation in Aeronautics.
