Dr. Gavin Tabor

Gavin Tabor is Professor of CFD at the University of Exeter and has spent much of his career developing and promoting CFD and the open source code OpenFOAM. Having started off studying Physics at university (BA Natural Sciences, University of Cambridge, 1990; DPhil Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Oxford, 1994), he then worked for 5 years as a postdoc in the research group led by Prof David Gosman at Imperial College, working on CFD for multiphase flow and premixed turbulent combustion. At this time he also began working with and contributing to the code FOAM (Field Operation And Manipulation), later to be released as OpenFOAM.
Appointed as a lecturer in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Exeter in 1999, he has developed an extensive research programme in CFD in areas as diverse as turbulence modelling, multiphysics, image based meshing, and optimisation. He has also worked on the application of CFD in areas such as biofluid mechanics, sustainable urban drainage and additive manufacture, and collaborated closely with major UK and international companies – current collaborations are with Hydro International (SUDs), Torin Sifan (turbomachinery) and Oxford Instruments (plasma simulation). In addition to the “traditional” area of physics-based simulation in CFD, Prof Tabor’s recent work has also included Machine Learning/Data Science approaches to simulation, including Bayesian Optimisation and Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs).
Prof Tabor continues to be active within the international OpenFOAM community, particularly as Chair of the Joint Technical Committees for OpenFOAM Governance, and on the Editorial Advisory Board for the new OpenFOAM Journal. He is a member of the CCP-WSI+ team building a UK community in numerical Wave-Structure simulation and other coupled multi-physics problems, and also part of the Isambard Tier 2 HPC team. At the University of Exeter he teaches courses on Fluid Mechanics and CFD, and is the Director of Research and Innovation for the Department of Engineering within the Faculty of Environment, Science and Economy (FESE). He is a Fellow of the IOP and both a Chartered Engineer and Physicist.