Edwin A. (Todd) Cowen, associate professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, was one of three Cornell faculty members to win the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship award for 2004. They are among 185 artists, scholars, and scientists from the United States and Canada selected from more than 3,200 applicants for this year's competition.

Guggenheim Fellowship award decisions are based on the recommendations of hundreds of expert advisers and the approval of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation's board of trustees. Winners are selected based on distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment.

Cowen, director of the DeFrees Hydraulics Laboratory at Cornell, will use his fellowship award to study turbulence and sediment transport processes in the region of the beach where the sea meets the land and, thus, is alternatively dry and wet. Because this region, known as the swash zone, is the interface between land and sea, it is the primary area where beach erosion occurs.

"My plan is to develop a fiber optic-based particle image velocimetry system for use in both the laboratory and field on two-phase flows, in particular sediment-laden flows," Cowen said.

The Guggenheim award will allow Cowen to extend his research into a natural setting using his group's National Science Foundation–funded laboratory research which uses impermeable model beaches made from glass. The developed instrumentation research ultimately will be deployed on two different beaches to look at the small-scale details of turbulent sediment transport in the swash zone. The work will be carried out while Cowen is on sabbatical leave in Spain, working with the Environmental Flow Dynamics Research Group in the Andalusian Center of the Environment at the University of Granada.

Other winners from Cornell were two members of the Department of English: Roger Gilbert and Douglas Mao.

—David Brand, Cornell News Service