UMass Amherst Selects MIE’s David Schmidt as a 2025 Provost Professor

Content

UMass Amherst Provost and Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Abd-El-Khalick has selected Professor David Schmidt of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department to receive the lifetime honorific of Provost Professor. The title, which recognizes exceptional achievement in research and in teaching, was conferred at the Celebration of Faculty Excellence on Tuesday, April 22.  Read UMass News Release.

The 2025 Provost Professors were selected from a competitive group of nominations by the Provost Professor Selection Committee. The Provost Professor title is designated for tenure-system faculty who hold the rank of professor and do not hold a named or distinguished professorship.  The conferral of the title also grants a $12,500 award, which includes a one-time award of $5,000, plus a three-year stipend of $2,500 annually.

Since his arrival at UMass Amherst in 2000, Schmidt has achieved many lofty goals as a teacher, student advisor, administrator, and head of the Multiphase Flow Simulation Laboratory.

Schmidt’s lab has participated in an impressive total of more than $10 million in research projects, and his groundbreaking research has garnered at least 61 external grants, 84 journal publications, and 103 conference publications.

That research has also produced a 2021 U.S. patent for “Active Cooling of Cold-spray Nozzles by Compressed Gas Expansion,” held jointly with the Army Research Laboratory by Schmidt, Jim Watkins, Jacobo Morere Rodriguez, and Victor Champagne.

As Schmidt explains about his research, which includes sprays, cavitation, and other multiphase flows, “My passions are clean energy and accelerating simulation through machine learning…We seek to improve the performance and reduce the emissions of modern power systems by better understanding of the multiphase flows.”

Schmidt adds that his studies “combine the intellectual challenge of multiple phenomena interacting at multiple scales and provide the long-term benefits to society of cleaner and more efficient power.”

According to Schmidt, the research in his lab has other major applications in addition to the performance and emissions of modern power systems.

“For diesel and jet engines,” as Schmidt explains, ”the spray quality has a tremendous impact on the emissions. We also simulate sprays in rockets, where there is a great difficulty predicting and controlling the combustion process.”

In addition, as Schmidt notes, “Offshore-wind energy is a particularly engaging research topic. The waters off the coast of New England offer good wind resources and close proximity to population centers. With our lab's emphasis on waves and fluid-structure interaction, we provide new predictive methods for the design process.”

The clearest confirmation of Schmidt’s success is his accumulation of honors. These include the Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award from the Society of Automotive Engineering (SAE), his selection as an SAE Fellow, the SAE Long-time Member Service Award, an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, a fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Bologna, the 2023-2024 University Distinguished Teaching Award from UMass Amherst, the College of Engineering Outstanding Teacher Award, the student-selected Mechanical Engineering Professor of the Year Award and Advisor of the Year Award (twice), and many other distinctions.