Scientific solutions to global security challenges
Werner Dahm
Werner Dahm, an ASU Foundation Professor and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the School for the Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy, is leading an effort to establish a security and defense science institute at ASU that will focus on finding solutions to national and global security challenges.
Drawing on the expertise of ASU researchers in a variety of fields, the university-wide institute will address issues related to national defense, homeland security, border security, counterterrorism, cybercrime and related areas.
“This is a tremendous opportunity to bring engineers, social scientists and legal experts together, so that beyond technology we can look at the root causes of the problems, the global disparities and tensions that lead to national and international threats,” he says.
“The way ASU has organized itself to address these kinds of global challenges is unique,” Dahm says “This is one of the few places where a collaborative effort to focus on problems of such a big scope is even possible.”
Dahm joined ASU from the U.S. Air Force, where he had been chief scientist for the past two years. Since 2008, he has worked full-time at the Pentagon as the chief scientific adviser to the chief of staff and secretary of the Air Force, consulting on a wide range of scientific and technical issues affecting the Air Force’s mission. Dahm previously worked in industry as a research engineer in the Transonic Wind Tunnel Section of the Propulsion Wind Tunnel Facility at the U.S. Air Force Arnold Engineering Development Center. He has been a member of the engineering faculty at the University of Michigan since 1985, where he became a professor of aerospace engineering in 1997 and head of the Laboratory for Turbulence and Combustion.
His primary research and teaching focus has been fluid dynamics, turbulent flows, combustion and propulsion. He holds several U.S. patents in these areas.
He earned his doctorate in aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology, a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Tennessee Space Institute, and a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
