Professor Richard Willden

Richard originally trained as an Aeronautical Engineer at the Department of Aeronautics at Imperial College London, completing his undergraduate studies there in 1998, and staying on for doctoral and post-doctoral studies until 2002. Following a one year post-doctoral position at Cambridge he returned to Imperial College as an Royal Academy of Engineering / EPSRC research fellow to conduct research in the areas of bluff body fluid mechanics and flow-induced vibrations. In 2007 he transferred this fellowship to Oxford and took up a position as an RCUK academic fellow in marine renewable energy, later becoming a university lecturer and tutorial fellow at St Edmund Hall in October 2012.

Richard’s research interests are broadly in the area of low speed fluid mechanics; in particular bluff body fluid mechanics, marine renewable energy generation, computational fluid dynamics, fluid-structure interaction and flow-induced vibrations. He currently leads two large research projects in tidal energy generation and supervises a substantial group in this area. Recent contributions include fundamental analytical work to redefine the upper limits of energy extraction from tidal flows and the development of farm optimisation tools to increase tidal farm energy yields.