Brian Cantwell is the Edward C. Wells Professor in the school of engineering and served as chairman of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics from 2001 to 2008. He received the B.A. and B.S. from the University of Notre Dame in 1967 and 1968. Following graduation he worked at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston where he participated in ground testing of the LEM ascent engine for the Apollo program. In January 1969 he joined the U.S. Army and served for two years. During active duty in Belgium, he received the diploma from the Von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics. After military service, he attended graduate school at Caltech completing the MS in 1971 and the PhD in 1976. He has been a member of the Stanford faculty since 1978. In his research, Professor Cantwell uses similarity methods to investigate the space-time structure of turbulent flows. Research topics have included experimental and numerical investigations of variable density and reacting flows. Most recently his research has been concentrated on measurements of the mixing and combustion between a flowing oxidizer and liquid droplets entrained from the surface of a melting fuel. This research has led to the identification of a new class of very fast burning fuels for application to hybrid propulsion. His teaching duties have included courses on aircraft and rocket propulsion, compressible flow, turbulence, similarity methods and experimentation. He was given the excellence in teaching award by the Stanford student chapter of the AIAA in 1984 and 1988. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the AIAA, a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society a member of Sigma Xi and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He is the author of four books including a textbook on symmetry analysis published by Cambridge Press in September 2002.