Petia Vlahovska

Petia Vlahovska
Петя Влаховска
Born1972 or 1973 (age 53–54)
OccupationEngineer
Awards
Academic background
Alma mater
ThesisDynamics of a surfactant-covered drop and the non-Newtonian rheology of emulsions (2003)
Doctoral advisor
  • Jerzy Blawzdziewicz
  • Michael Loewenberg
Academic work
Sub-discipline
  • Biophysical engineering
  • Fluid mechanics
Institutions

Petia Mladenova Vlahovska[1] (born circa 1973) is a Bulgarian engineer specializing in biophysics and fluid mechanics. A 2019 Fellow of the American Physical Society and 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, she is a professor in the McCormick School of Engineering, in the Department of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics.[2]

Biography

Vlahovska was born in around 1973 to parents who were engineers.[3] Moving from her native northern Bulgaria,[3] she obtained her MSc (1994) in Chemistry at Sofia University,[4] where she later started her postgraduate studies as a research associate at the Laboratory of Chemical Physics and Engineering.[5] She later moved across the Atlantic Ocean to Yale University, where she obtained her MS in Chemical Engineering (1999), MPhil in Mechanical Engineering (2001), and PhD in Chemical Engineering (2003); her doctoral dissertation Dynamics of a surfactant-covered drop and the non-Newtonian rheology of emulsions was supervised by Jerzy Blawzdziewicz and Michael Loewenberg.[5] She was later a David Crighton Fellow (2004-2005)[4][5] at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge.[6]

After visiting positions at the Brown University School of Engineering (2003-2005) and a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces[4] Theory and Bio-systems Department (2005-2006), she moved to Dartmouth College's Thayer School of Engineering in 2006 and became an assistant professor.[5] In 2009, she received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation.[4] In 2010, she returned to Brown, while retaining an adjunct assistant professor position at the Thayer School of Engineering until 2011 and Dartmouth's department of physics until 2012. She was promoted from assistant professor to associate professor in 2013.[5] She moved to Northwestern University (where she had been a visiting scholar from 2014 to 2015) in 2017 and was promoted there to professor in 2020.[5] At Northwestern, she has also been part of the Northwestern-Argonne Institute of Science and Engineering.[5]

She and her research group investigate biological and physical systems through theoretical and experimental models.[7] She teaches classes in fluid mechanics and biophysics, as well as in applied mathematics and vector calculus.[5] In 2016, she was awarded the Humboldt Research Award to work with the scientist Rumiana Dimova in the Department of Theory and Biosystems in the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces.[8] In 2019, she was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society for "pioneering work on problems in interfacial flows and soft matter, including the fluid-structure interaction in Stokes flow, the mechanics of biomembranes, and electrohydrodynamics."[9] She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2024;[10] she intends to use the Fellowship to do research on the use of active fluids in cytological microbotics.[11] In 2025, she was one of six engineers to receive a National Science Foundation TRAILBLAZER Award.[12]

References

  1. ^ "Petia Vlahovska". The Mathematics Genealogy Project. Retrieved 5 October 2024.
  2. ^ "Petia Vlahovska". www.mccormick.northwestern.edu. Retrieved 5 October 2024.
  3. ^ a b "New Faculty Profile: Petia Vlahovska". Brown Engineering News. Brown School of Engineering. 2 February 2011. Retrieved 5 October 2024 – via Blogger.
  4. ^ a b c d "Petia Vlahovska". AIChE Institute for Learning and Innovation. 26 March 2021. Retrieved 24 October 2025.
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h Vlahovska, Petia M. "Curriculum vitae". Northwestern University. Retrieved 5 October 2024.
  6. ^ "Petia Vlahovska". Guggenheim Foundation. Retrieved 24 October 2025.
  7. ^ "Petia Vlahovska – Complex Fluids". sites.northwestern.edu. Retrieved 5 October 2024.
  8. ^ "Prof. Dr. Petia M. Vlahovska". Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Retrieved 24 October 2025.
  9. ^ "Division of Fluid Dynamics Fellowship". American Physical Society. Retrieved 5 October 2024.
  10. ^ "Petia Vlahovska". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved 5 October 2024.
  11. ^ Paul, Marla (15 April 2024). "Six Northwestern faculty named 2024 Guggenheim Fellows". Northwestern University. Retrieved 5 October 2024.
  12. ^ "Vlahovska Receives NSF TRAILBLAZER Award". Northwestern University. Retrieved 24 October 2025.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.