Title: Assistant professor of mechanical engineering and IIHR assistant faculty research engineer

Research interests: Fluid dynamics, turbulent flow, and drag  

If you ask Cong Wang where home is, you’ll get a complicated answer. Born in northern China, he went to Singapore as an undergraduate, where he earned a BEng degree in engineering science. He came to the United States and the California Institute of Technology for graduate school and earned MS and PhD degrees in aeronautics. He stayed on at Caltech for a postdoc and then as a research scientist — 10 years in all. 

“The question of where my home is — it’s very difficult, because every place, including Iowa — I love them,” Wang says. “I love my life here. I love Los Angeles and I love Singapore, and of course, my parents are still in China.”  

He and his wife Shanshan have two children (ages 4 and 1 1/2), who are also loving life in Iowa City. Wang enjoys taking his kids outside to experience nature as he did as a boy.  

Growing up in China, Wang was fascinated by insects, birds, and fish. “Even now as an engineering scientist … I still think that’s a great resource for my research work,” he says. “Birds know how to control their feathers, their wings, and they can manipulate the flow.” Even compared to state-of-the-art technology, Wang says, nature often does it better. 

He’s excited by the emerging field of bio-inspired engineering — essentially, learning from the natural world. “Mother Nature has already developed very dedicated flow control devices,” Wang says. “The fish, the birds — they know how to deal with very complex flow motion.”  

He adds, “We can learn from the natural world … and based on that knowledge, we can design some new devices and systems, all to achieve better performance.” 

How did he happen to end up at IIHR? Hunter Rouse and Fred Stern both played a role in bringing Wang to Iowa.  

As a graduate student, Wang says, he watched former IIHR director Hunter Rouse’s film series on fluid mechanics. “It was very inspiring and concise,” he remembers. Each film included a credit to IIHR. That stuck with Wang. Later, as a researcher focusing on naval hydrodynamics, he met many excellent scholars from the University of Iowa, including Professor Fred Stern and others.  

“The University of Iowa is very strong in my field of naval hydrodynamics,” Wang says. “I’m very grateful that I can come here and work together with these excellent scholars.” 

Wang’s work focuses on fluid dynamics — experimental work and theoretical analysis of turbulent flow, which can cause a huge energy loss for ships and other vehicles. He hopes to develop devices that will allow researchers to achieve better turbulence control. 

Wang knows it will take time to solve such fundamental problems. “I think doing research is maybe 95% failure. Most of the time it doesn’t work,” he says. But when it does, that’s the payback. “That kind of ah-ha moment — it’s very rewarding,” Wang says.