Purdue AAE associate professor Joe Jewell has been elected Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society, the oldest aeronautical professional society in the world. This represents the highest honor awarded by the RAeS, recognizing professionals who have made outstanding contributions in aeronautics or aerospace, attained high levels of responsibility, or had a long and distinguished career. 

“This is a great recognition of his contributions in experimental hypersonics,” says AAE department head Bill Crossley.  

Jewell holds the distinguished title of John Bogdanoff Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Purdue. His research focus is in hypersonic aerothermodynamics, boundary layer instability, low-disturbance wind tunnels and spacecraft re-entry aerodynamics. Jewell’s expertise with expansion tunnels and reflected shock tunnels recently brought Purdue’s Mach-40 Hypulse shock tunnel to life.

Jewell earned his Ph.D. in aeronautics from Caltech in 2014 and joined Purdue AAE’s faculty in 2019 after 5 years at the US Air Force Research Laboratory. He has been an RAeS member since 2005, when he began his master’s studies at the University of Oxford, in England, as a Rhodes Scholar. Jewell has returned frequently for conferences, collaborations, and lectures, giving seminars recently at both Oxford and Cambridge. He has also served on two NATO Science and Technology Organization working groups on hypersonics with international colleagues, and currently is the American co-chair for a new NATO Exploratory Task on predicting boundary layer transition in realistic conditions. 

“I’ve been pleased to be involved with several RAeS events in recent years. The Society had me as an invited speaker at their open Hypersonics conference in London in 2023, and I also attended the closed hypersonics conference they hosted at Lockheed Martin UK last fall near Bedford. The last time I had been in Bedford, it was to row at Bedford Head for Keble College, Oxford,” Jewell says. “This is really the product of pursuing long-standing collaborations in the UK over the past 20 years!”