Brian White

Adjunct Research Associate Professor

Laboratory for Environmental Fluid Dynamics

Education

Coastal Ocean Institute Postdoctoral Scholar, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Physical Oceanography and Biology Departments. 2006-2007
Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Environmental Fluid Mechanics. Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering. 2006
B.S. Civil & Environmental Engineering, Penn State University, 1999.

Research Interests

Environmental and geophysical fluid dynamics, stratified flows, turbulent mixing, ocean submesoscale dynamics, experimental and computational fluid dynamics

Research and Activities

Dr. White’s research is focused on Environmental Fluid Dynamics. He applies experimental and computational fluid dynamics to study the fundamental physics that govern the transport of water, energy, and biogeochemical tracers in the oceans and coastal waters. A diverse array of flow patterns exist at scales less than 1 km, but are unresolved by large-scale ocean models, providing a rich set of research questions for experimental and computational study. Specific focuses of Dr. White’s research group include the effects of density stratification on convection, shear instability, turbulent mixing, internal waves, the vertical transport of particulates, and biological-physical interactions and their role in the marine carbon cycle. Dr. White is a Co-PI in the UNC Applied Mathematics-Marine Sciences Joint Fluids Lab, where he supervises graduate students, undergraduates, and post-doctoral investigators. Before joining the UNC Marine Sciences faculty, he was the Coastal Ocean Institute Postdoctoral Scholar at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.