Aditya Aiyer, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and mechanics at Lehigh University, has been selected as an Early-Career Research Fellow by the Gulf Research Program (GRP) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Aiyer is among six researchers named to the fellowship’s Offshore Energy Safety track for 2025-2027. Fellows receive a $76,000 award and mentoring support to advance research during the critical pre-tenure phase of their careers.
“The fellowship holds special meaning to me, as I was funded by the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative—the predecessor to GRP—during my PhD to study oil spill remediation,” he says. “We are eager to continue working on problems related to offshore energy and environmental sustainability.”
Aiyer joined the faculty of the P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science in 2023 and leads the Multiphase and Environmental Turbulence (MET) Laboratory.
His research group uses theoretical analysis, high-fidelity simulations, and advanced modeling to study environmental turbulent flows, air-sea interaction, offshore renewable energy systems, and particle transport. His work has appeared in leading journals including Journal of Fluid Mechanics, Physical Review Fluids, and Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences. He is also active in Lehigh’s Institute for Cyber Physical Infrastructure and Energy (I-CPIE).
Prior to joining Lehigh, he was a postdoctoral scholar at Princeton University. He earned his MS and PhD in mechanical engineering from Johns Hopkins University, where his doctoral research examined microscale droplet dynamics and oceanic turbulence in deepwater spill scenarios.
The Gulf Research Program’s Early-Career Research Fellowship aims to strengthen scientific capacity related to offshore energy production, environmental systems, and community resilience. It was founded in 2013 using funds from legal settlements with the companies involved in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster.
Read more about the Gulf Research Program in the National Academies’ news release.
