Eric Shaqfeh is the Lester Levi Carter Professor and Department Chair of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University. He earned a B.S.E. summa cum laude from Princeton University (1981), and a M.S. (1982) and Ph.D. (1986) from Stanford University all in Chemical Engineering. In 1986, he was a NATO postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge. From 1987 through 1989 he was employed as a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ before joining the Stanford Chemical Engineering faculty in early 1990. In 2001 he received a dual appointment and became Professor of Mechanical Engineering. He is most recently (as of 2004) a faculty member in the Institute of Computational and Mathematical Engineering at Stanford.

Shaqfeh’s current research interests include non-Newtonian fluid mechanics (especially in the area of elastic instabilities, and turbulent drag reduction), nonequilibrium polymer statistical dynamics (focusing on single molecules studies of DNA), and suspension mechanics (particularly of fiber suspensions and particles/vesicles in microfluidics).