8/18/2025 Debra Levey Larson
Written by Debra Levey Larson
For her pioneering work deriving new thermo-physical insights into complex, multiscale high-speed flows using particle kinetic simulation approaches, Deborah Levin is receiving the 2025 AIAA Thermophysics award. She is a professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering in The Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
“The ability to understand the physics of multiscale flows will determine the ultimate development of aerospace engineering systems,” said Michael Wright, Dragonfly EDL Phase Lead at NASA Ames Research Center, who nominated her for the award. “Over the last 15 years, Deborah Levin has used particle-kinetic approaches to incorporate molecular physics into the modelling of large systems encountered in hypersonic flows.”
Wright said the modeling and simulation computational technique Levin primarily used is direct simulation Monte Carlo because this method provides the highest fidelity possible in the above multi-scale problems.
“DSMC is known to be computationally intensive,” Wright said. “Professor Levin’s important contribution to this field has been to develop heterogeneous computing algorithms with strong scaling on high-performance computing platforms to study mutli-scale phenomena such as the influence of shock bi-modality on separation bubble unsteadiness, three-dimensional blast waves of entrained complex shaped particulate lifting and transport, and complex morphology heat transfer in hypersonic boundary layers.”
Levin made historic contributions to the return-to-flight effort after the Columbia accident that successfully predicted atomic oxygen erosion of reinforced carbon-carbon Shuttle tiles in NASA/Johnson Space Center tests.
“Her methodology was ultimately used by NASA to replace earlier RCC rupture empirical relationships,” Wright said.
Among Levin’s many contributions, Wright cited her novel work demonstrating that DSMC is a viable approach in modeling mobility parameters in compressible gas regimes.
“Her research has been the first to predict the effects of non-spherical particulates, those of highly irregular shapes, and how that effects their lift and drag forces and have led to the development of a stochastic model that provides first-order force approximations of dense particulate flows with aerodynamic interactions.”
Levin earned her Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology in chemistry. She was a professor and lecturer at George Washington University in the Dept. of Chemistry and an aerospace engineering faculty member at Penn State for 14 years before coming to Illinois in 2014.
She is a Fellow of the American Institute for Aeronautic and Astronautics. She has been an active member since 1990, chairing more than 15 multiple sessions in the Thermophysics and Plasmadynamics and Laser Conferences and served as organizer and chair of the Plasmadynamics and Lasers Technical Committee in 1998. She was an associate editor for the Journal of Thermophysics and Heat Transfer from January 2007 to 2014.
As an international authority in the multi-disciplinary research area of modeling and simulation of energetic chemically reacting flows, Levin has approximately 160 refereed and over 300 conference papers. She has presented 45 seminars and invited talks domestically and internationally on her research at professional, academic, industrial, and government institutions.
As an educator, Levin has taught approximately 1,000 undergraduate students since 1998 in courses that span first-year chemistry, spacecraft environments, physics of gases, the fundamentals of fluid flows, numerical methods, and rocket propulsion. To date, she graduated 19 Ph.D. students and 20 master’s degree students in aerospace engineering,
Levin co-chaired the 27th International Symposium on Rarefied Gas Dynamics, bringing it back to the United States after a hiatus of 20 years. She has served as an editor on several conference proceedings. She is currently the chair of the International Advisory Committee and is supporting the Secretary of the Air Force as a member of Department of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. Levin is also a senior member of IEEE and a member of the IEEE Plasma Science and Applications Executive Committee since October 2021.