Kenji Takizawa, adjunct professor of mechanical engineering (MECH) at Rice and professor of MECH at Waseda University in Japan, has been elected a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).
Takizawa works at Rice with the research group of Tayfun Tezduyar, the James F. Barbour Professor of MECH and co-leader (with Takizawa) of the Team for Advanced Flow Simulation and Modeling. He was recognized for “bringing reliable computational analysis and creative solutions to some of the most challenging fluid-structure interaction and fluid-mechanics problems in parachute, transportation, energy and biomedical technologies and in bioinspired flight.”
Takizawa earned his Ph.D. from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2005, joined Rice in 2007 as a research associate, later became a research scientist and assumed his Waseda faculty position in 2011. His research focuses on computational fluid mechanics and fluid-structure interaction.
Takizawa has developed methods for the computational analysis of fluid-structure interactions, fluid-object and fluid-particle interactions, free-surface flows and two-fluid interfaces. Among the applications for his research are spacecraft parachutes, cardiovascular flow analysis, wing aerodynamics with the wing motion extracted from video recordings of locusts in a wind tunnel, and flow analysis around a tire with road contact.
He has co-authored a textbook, Computational Fluid-Structure Interaction, published more than 100 journal articles indexed by the Web of Science and 25 book chapters. In 2019, Takizawa received the JSPS Prize from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.