Prof L He (FASME, FRAeS)

Statutory Professor of Computational Aerothermal Engineering, University of Oxford.

Li He earned BSc & MSc at Beihang University (1982, 1984), and PhD at Cambridge University (1990). He remained at Cambridge as a postdoc and a college research fellow until 1993, then moved to Durham University, as Lecturer (1993), Reader (1998) and Professor (2000). At Durham, he became the Head of Thermofluids and the Director of Research for the School of Engineering, before being elected to the Royal Academy Engineering/Rolls-Royce Research Chair at Oxford (2008-2013).

He holds the Statutory Chair Professorship of Computational Aerothermal Engineering at University of Oxford, and is the Oxford co-director of the EPSRC Centre of Doctoral Training (CDT) in Gas Turbine Aerodynamics. He had been the head of the Osney Laboratory (2008-2011), and the acting director of the Rolls-Royce University Technology Centre (UTC) in heat transfer and aerodynamics (2008-2010). During the tenure of his headship, the Osney Lab had undertaken a major (18 months) upgrading relocation, acquired the 2nd generation Oxford Turbine Research Facility, and doubled the number of academics. The new Osney Lab has been the centre of reinvigorated turbomachinery research at Oxford (known as ‘Oxford Thermofluids Institute, OTI’ since 2018).

Professor He’s primary research interest is in developing unsteady aerodynamic, aeroelastic and aerothermal prediction and design/optimization methods. He is recognised for instigating the Fourier methods for turbomachinery in 1990s. The Fourier methods have since then been further developed in various forms, implemented in many commercial, industrial and research CFD codes for practical applications worldwide. The corresponding development efforts have also evolved into an active research topic area in turbomachinery over the last two decades.

He has been an invited speaker in keynote and plenary lectures at a number of international conferences, also at the VKI lecture series on turbomachinery unsteady flow and aeroelasticity and the NATO lecture series on gas turbine design optimization. He has been an associate editor for the Aeronautical Journal (2012-), the ASME Journal of Turbomachinery (2012-2019) and the Journal of Global Power and Propulsion Society (2014-2019). He was a special issue guest editor for the Journal of Turbomachinery (2018-2019) and the International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamics (2012-2013) and Applied Thermal Engineering (2020-2021). He served as the review chair for the GPPS technical conference in Shanghai (2017), and the conference chair of the 15th International Symposium of Unsteady Aerodynamics, Aeroelasticity and Aeroacoustics in Turbomachinery (ISUAAAT15). Since 2020, He has been serving as the editor-in-chief for the Journal of GPPS.

Professor He’s publications include more than 120 journal articles and 10 patents (as the lead applicant) filed in UK, Europe and US on novel turbomachinery aerothermal applications. He is recipient of six ASME/IGTI Best Paper Awards: in Heat Transfer (2009, 2017, 2020), in Turbomachinery (2015, 2020) and in Steam Turbines (2017). He also received the 2017 GPPS Best Paper Prize. In 2021, he received of the prestigious ASME Gas Turbine Award.

Professor He was elected to Fellow of ASME in 2006, Fellow of Royal Aeronautical Society in 2011.