Biography

Professor Bakhtier (Baki) Farouk received his BS degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) in 1975. He served as a Lecturer in the Mechanical Engineering Department at BUET during 1975-1976. Professor Farouk started his training in the United States as a graduate student at the Mechanical Engineering Department, University of Houston, Texas in summer 1976 (Advisor: Professor Fazle Hussain). He received his MS and PhD degrees in 1978 and 1981 respectively from the University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware (Advisor: Professor Selcuk Guceri) and immediately thereafter joined the Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics department in Drexel University as an Assistant Professor in fall 1981. He was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 1987 and Professor in 1989. He is serving as the J. Harland Billings Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Drexel since 2004.

Professor Farouk’s research and teaching interests over the last four decades include transport in supercritical fluids, microscale flows and heat transfer, thermoacoustics, combustion and fires, transport processes in materials processing, multi-phase flows, atmospheric pressure plasma processing, environmental flows and disinfection, impact physics, and computational fluid dynamics. Various federal agencies and numerous companies have sponsored Professor Farouk’s research for the past forty years. Professor Farouk has published more than one hundred and sixty five journal papers in his research areas and twenty eight of his graduate students received the PhD degree from Drexel University, to date. He has also contributed a number of book chapters. Many of his former PhD students are now pursuing teaching and research carriers in academia and industry in the US and in various other countries of the world.

He has served as a consultant for various industries. He is a registered Professional Engineer (PE) in the state of Pennsylvania, a Life Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a Senior Member of the American Physical Society. He was awarded the SAE Ralph Teetor Educational Award in 1986 and the American Society of Metals Henry Marion Howe Medal in 1989. He served as a Summer Faculty Research Associate at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D. C. in 1988 and 1997. He also served as a Guest Researcher at Air Products and Chemicals Inc., the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at Princeton University in AY 1991-92 and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD in 1999-00 respectively on sabbatical leaves from Drexel. He was awarded the Presidential Citation for outstanding achievement by the University of Delaware in 1999. Professor Farouk received the Ira Cohen Fluid Dynamics Award from the Philadelphia Chapter of AIAA in May 2008. In AY 2015-16, Professor Farouk served as a Guest Researcher at the Army Research Office, Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD to initiate research projects on solid-solid and solid-liquid impact problems. Recently, he served as a Summer Faculty Research Associate at the Federal Aviation Agency in Atlantic City, NJ. in 2021.

He has served as an ABET Mechanical Engineering program reviewer for various US and foreign universities during 2002- 2012.

Degrees / Education

• PhD, University of Delaware
• MSME, University of Delaware
• BSME, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology

Research Interests

Academic Distinctions

• The Southern New Jersey Professional Societies, Engineer of the Year , November 2018
• ASME – Life Fellow (since 2017)
• AIAA – Associate Fellow (since 2011)
• APS – Senior Member (since 2017)
• AIAA Philadelphia Section, Ira Cohen Fluid Dynamics Award, May 2008
• Drexel University, J. Harland Billings Professor, since April 2004
• University of Delaware, Presidential Citation for Outstanding Achievement, 1999
• Drexel University, Research Achievement Award, April 1993
• ASM - American Society of Metals, Henry Marion Howe Medal, October 1989
• SAE, Ralph Teetor Educational Award, January 1988
• Listed in American Men and Women in Science, Who’s Who in Science and Engineering
• Associate Editor, ASME Journal of Heat Transfer, 2003 – 2006
• Associate Editor, Metallurgical Transactions B, 1998 - 2003