Bernard Grossman, Ph.D.

Dr. Bernard Grossman, Taksha Professor of Aerospace on the faculty of the School of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (SSTEM), serves as an educator, researcher, and administrator in the field of aerospace engineering. He has been a Professor of Aerospace Engineering at Virginia Tech since 1982, and served as the Department Chair of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering at that institution from 1993 to 2002. He is currently Professor Emeritus at Virginia Tech, and actively teaches distance-learning graduate courses in real gas dynamics and hypersonic aerodynamics.

From 2002 until 2012, while on assignment from Virginia Tech, he served as the founding Vice President of Education and Outreach at the National Institute of Aerospace (NIA) in Hampton, Virginia. One of his activities there was to organize the Hypersonic Educational Initiative, which was a series of six short courses on detailed aspects of hypersonics, with course materials assembled by more than 50 of the nation’s leading experts in all aspects of hypersonic flight. He retired from NIA in 2012, and continues to serve as a consultant.

Prior to his time at Virginia Tech, Dr. Grossman was at Grumman Aerospace Corporation in NY, where he held the position of Head of the Theoretical Aerodynamics Laboratory in the Research Department. His education was at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, where he obtained his Ph.D. in Astronautics, conducting thesis work on combustion instability and theoretical fluid dynamics. His research interests have evolved to include a broad list of topics within computational fluid dynamics (CFD), including reacting flow algorithms and multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO), and he has published more than 300 technical papers. He has taught courses in computational fluid dynamics, numerical analysis, and various topics in fluid mechanics, aerodynamics, and gas dynamics. He has presented numerous short courses in CFD and gas dynamics in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.