1. John Oluseun Dabiri is a Nigerian-American aeronautics engineer engineer and the Centennial Chair Professor at the California Institute of Technology, holding joint appointments in the Graduate Aerospace Laboratories and the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
John Dabiri's research focuses on unsteady fluid mechanics and flow physics, with applications in biology, renewable energy, and environmental systems.
John Dabiri designed a vertical-axis wind turbine system influenced by the movement patterns of schooling fish, with the goal of improving wind energy efficiency.
John Dabiri's parents were Nigerian immigrants who settled in Toledo, Ohio, in 1975.
John Dabiri's father was a mechanical engineer who taught math at a community college.
John Dabiri was primarily interested in rockets and jets, and spent two summers doing research that included work on helicopter design.
John Dabiri was a finalist for both the Rhodes Scholarship and the Marshall Scholarship.
From 2005 to 2009, John Dabiri was an assistant professor at Caltech in aeronautics and bioengineering.
John Dabiri was promoted to tenure at the age of 29, and to full professor in 2010.
In 2015, John Dabiri moved to Stanford as a professor in civil and environmental engineering and mechanical engineering.
John Dabiri serves or has served on the Board of Directors of NVIDIA Corporation, the Board of Trustees of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Secretary of Energy Energy Advisory Board, and as an advisor to X at Alphabet Inc.
John Dabiri serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics and the Journal of the Royal Society Interface; the US National Committee for Theoretical and Applied Mechanics ; and the Defense Science Study Group.
John Dabiri established the Caltech Field Laboratory for Optimized Wind Energy in 2011, a wind farm that investigates energy exchange in an array of vertical-axis wind turbines.
John Dabiri partnered with Windspire Energy for the use of three of 24 turbines that stand approximately 30 feet tall and 4 feet wide.
John Dabiri started a company, Scalable Wind Solutions, to commercialize the software used to optimally place the wind turbines.
An additional area of research in John Dabiri's lab focuses on the physics of turbulence transition, a longstanding challenge in the field of fluid mechanics.
John Dabiri was named Professor of the Month at Caltech in February 2012.
John Dabiri has taught classes including a graduate class on propulsion, a biomechanics course, a lab class on experimental methods in aeronautics and applied physics, and the introduction fluid mechanics course for which he was highly recommended by students.
John Dabiri has been involved in his church's mentoring program, The Faith Foundation.
John Dabiri has been awarded NSF research grants multiple times in more than five different fields.
John Dabiri is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.