International Eurasian Academy of Sciences, IEAS

Academician

Harindra Joseph S. Fernando

Profile:

Elected Academician of the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences on 14 September 2017, Professor Harindra Joseph S. Fernando is a distinguished environmental fluid dynamicist whose research spans fundamental turbulence physics, complex-terrain meteorology, urban climate, and ocean–atmosphere interactions. Born in Sri Lanka, he earned his B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Sri Lanka in 1979, followed by an M.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1983) in Geophysical Fluid Dynamics from Johns Hopkins University. After postdoctoral research at the California Institute of Technology, he joined Arizona State University in 1984, where he became Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and served as Founding Director of the Center for Environmental Fluid Dynamics from 1994 to 2009. Since 2010, he has held the Wayne and Diana Murdy Endowed Professorship of Engineering and Geosciences at the University of Notre Dame, with appointments spanning civil and environmental engineering, aerospace and mechanical engineering, and applied and computational mathematics and statistics. A Fellow of seven major professional societies, including the American Physical Society, American Meteorological Society, American Geophysical Union, and American Society of Mechanical Engineers, he was elected to Academia Europaea in 2009 and has received honorary doctorates from the University of Grenoble and the University of Dundee. He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Environmental Fluid Dynamics and Associate Editor of the Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

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His research combines theoretical analysis, high-resolution numerical modelling, and large-scale international field experiments to investigate complex environmental flows across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. As Principal Investigator of major campaigns including MATERHORN, PERDIGÃO, CASPER, ASIRI, MISO-BOB, IFFExO, C-FOG, and FATIMA, he has advanced understanding of microscale mountain winds, nocturnal boundary layers, monsoon variability, coastal fog, and atmospheric dispersion. His scientific contributions encompass more than 350 archival journal papers published across approximately sixty international journals, complemented by his editorship of the two-volume Handbook of Environmental Fluid Dynamics (CRC Press, 2013). With an h-index of 40 and more than 6,000 citations, his work has influenced both fundamental fluid mechanics and practical approaches to environmental prediction. The five selected publications below—covering complex-terrain flows in the PERDIGÃO experiment (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 2019), turbulent mixing in colliding gravity currents (Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2018), green and cool roofs for urban heat-island mitigation (Environmental Research Letters, 2016), internal waves and hydrodynamic instabilities in the Bay of Bengal (Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 2016), and flow, turbulence, and dispersion in urban environments (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 2015)—reflect a career dedicated to advancing environmental fluid dynamics while translating fundamental science into applications in wind energy, air quality, urban resilience, and climate adaptation.