Priyanka Dhopade received her PhD from the University of New South Wales in Canberra, Australia and was the recipient of the Zonta Amelia Earhart Fellowship award, awarded annually to the 35 most outstanding female aerospace PhD students worldwide. Since 2013 she has been researching the thermodynamics of jet engines in the Thermofluids Institute at Oxford University. Priyanka is an expert in computational fluid dynamics modelling of heat transfer, aerodynamics and aero-elasticity in jet engines. She is currently leading the modelling campaigns for various projects in collaboration with industry partners relating to turbine and compressor tip clearance control, turbine internal cooling and active flow control. In this episode, Priyanka and I talk about:

the challenges of improving the efficiency of current gas turbines
the intricacies of fluid dynamics modelling
and a topic particularly close to her heart, the diversity challenge in STEM fields.

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Selected Links from the Episode

Priyanka's research profile at Oxford University
Oxford Thermfluids Institute
Turbine Cooling and Design
Active tip-clearance control (Wiki and NASA)
What is CFD?
Women in Engineering at Oxford
Priyanka on the BBC
This is Engineering