Professor Joanna Szmelter joined the University from Cranfield University, in October 2006, where she was a Senior Lecturer in the Ballistics and CFD Centre. Prior to this she was Principal Engineer and Head of the Aerodynamic Technology Group at BAe Airbus Ltd. Here, she responsible for the development and implementation of all aspects of numerical methods for the aerodynamic design of civil transport aircraft.  

She gained her PhD and worked as a Research Associate at Swansea University. During the past fifteen years she has published extensively on atmospheric flow simulations. Her track record of contributions to the UK’s competitiveness also includes modelling methodologies that resulted in engineering design codes, used by leading UK industries and defence.  

In the mid-1990s she contributed to the introduction of unstructured meshes to BAe Airbus Ltd. Her innovative methods for wing design optimisation and viscous coupling techniques for complex geometries, operating on unstructured and structured Multiblock meshes, have been applied in the design of the recent Airbus aircrafts. She has also made pioneering contributions to mesh adaption and proposed some of the first flow solvers using the finite element discretisation.