Chairman’s Address

Dear colleagues and members:

The Corona pandemic has been severely impacting our professional and private lives for some time. As we experience another wave with widespread lockdowns, it becomes clear that our interactions will still be limited for some time to come. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, as potent vaccines promise some relief, but still quite some uncertainties remain for many of our planned activities. I don’t know when all of this will have passed, but I know already that we, as a community, have been working together to meet the challenge. In the end, this may well lead to a stronger ERCOFTAC.

One of the challenges has been to learn and improve on how to operate in a virtual world. As a consequence, we will be holding the Spring Festival in Cambridge UK in April either online or as a hybrid event including the 2020 da Vinci final (see announcement below). I understand that this is not the same as our usual face-to-face meeting, but I hope you still will tune in and find a way to interact with our community.

I was impressed how much activities members of our community have developed in helping with the Corona crisis. One example highlighted in this newsletter was the ERCOFTAC online meeting on Covid-19 flow physics in November organized by professors Gorokhovski and Casciola. A follow up is announced for January 15^th. Considering all our activities, don’t you also think that we should have a new Special Interest Group (SIG) on this topic? There is so much fluid mechanics driven research to do … If you are interested, please reach out to our SPC Chairman Prof. Stefan Hickel.

Thanks for all you are doing for the ERCOFTAC community! I wish you can still find joy and peace in this holiday season!

Prof. Dominic von Terzi,
Chairman of ERCOFTAC