Kelly Huang
By Alex Keimig
Kalsi Assistant Professor of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Kelly Huang has just wrapped up her second year as a UH faculty member, and it looks like nothing will be taking the wind from her sails.
Huang attended middle and high school in the Sugar Land area, but it was during her undergraduate experience at Cornell University that she “fell in love with fluid mechanics.”
“To me, it’s a topic that touches so much upon our daily lives; it’s how a lot of industrial processes work, but it also dictates so much of our natural environment,” she said.
Knowing that she wanted to both continue her research and teach at the college level, Huang further pursued fluid mechanics and turbulence research while earning her Ph.D. at Princeton University, followed by her postdoc at the University of Notre Dame.
“That’s where I started taking more of a pivot towards environmental fluid mechanics. After that, I was lucky enough to be able to secure a position at the University of Houston and come back to the area I grew up in,” said Huang.
It was serendipitous: in addition to being back near family and old friends, UH offers the experimental facilities Huang would need, including a large wind tunnel, to continue her laboratory experiments in fluid mechanics. She also appreciates how involved Cullen undergraduate students are with research; as an experimentalist, Huang enjoys involving undergraduates in her lab work.
“UH has a great fluid mechanics community as well, so I have a lot of colleagues who investigate similar areas to mine, and I’m excited when we get to collaborate.”
Huang describes these first few years as “very busy, but very rewarding.”
“I’ve worked to streamline my teaching in such a way that I’m able to help my students as much as possible. Because I really enjoy teaching, I probably spend a disproportionate amount of time on my classes, but I know that going forward will be a good foundation for my future self. I’m all about increasing the signal-to-noise ratio.”
When she’s not busy working on class content, Huang also enjoys field experimentation: taking instrumentation out into the field, “staying there for weeks at a time to try to capture some phenomena or another.”
“The last one I went on was looking for fog and turbulence interactions on a remote island off the Nova Scotia coast only accessible by boat or small airplane. It really gives you perspective when things don’t go as expected; you have to pivot and figure out what to do when something malfunctions, because you don’t always have the luxury of getting tech support on the phone. It’s taught me a lot about staying flexible and has given me some really unique experience when it comes to teaching and mentoring.”
Huang continues to look toward the future and its many unknowns with excitement.
“I’m being paid to learn, in a sense. I’m always learning new topics and trying to expand my research into different interdisciplinary areas, and I hope to continue to venture into different topics and work with new people to learn more and to help my students learn more, too.”