Rate My Professor Mark Owkes

Mark Owkes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Montana State University, where he joined the faculty in Fall 2014 as an Assistant Professor and also serves as the M&IE Graduate Coordinator. He earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University in August 2014, M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder in August 2011 with a focus on Energy and the Environment, and B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Clarkson University in May 2008 with a minor in Mathematics. Prior to his appointment at Montana State University, Owkes served as a Graduate Research Assistant at Cornell University, where he studied atomization processes of liquid jets and developed numerical schemes for volume-of-fluid methods, and at the University of Colorado Boulder, improving level set interface tracking and studying Coriolis flow meters.

Owkes specializes in computational fluid dynamics of gas-liquid multiphase flows, developing numerical methods to enhance simulation robustness and accuracy, extracting physics from direct numerical simulations to understand multiphase phenomena, and integrating uncertainty quantification. His work addresses applications such as fuel atomization and pollutant formation in sustainable bio-fuels. He received the NSF CAREER Award in April 2018. Key publications include "A mass and momentum conserving unsplit semi-Lagrangian framework for simulating multiphase flows" (Journal of Computational Physics, 2017), "Importance of Curvature Evaluation Scale for Predictive Simulations of Dynamic Gas-Liquid Interfaces" (Journal of Computational Physics, 2018), "An intrusive uncertainty quantification method for gas-liquid interface resolving simulations" (Journal of Computational Physics, 2019, with B. Turnquist), "Extracting primary atomization from high-fidelity simulations" (Atomization and Sprays, 2020, with C. Rubel), "A mesh-decoupled height function method for computing interface curvature" (Journal of Computational Physics, 2014), and "A discontinuous Galerkin conservative level set scheme for interface capturing in multiphase flows" (Journal of Computational Physics, 2013). Owkes teaches courses including Computer Aided Engineering III, mentors graduate students who have published papers and received NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program awards, and reviews manuscripts for Journal of Computational Physics, Atomization and Sprays, and Communications in Computational Physics.