Richard Stevens is a professor in the Physics of Fluids department at the University of Twente. His research centers on developing high-fidelity large eddy simulations (LES) to examine wind farm–atmosphere interactions, backed by a prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant. In 2017, he wrote a comprehensive review of wind farm fluid mechanics for the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics. His work involves LES of atmospheric flows and their interactions with wind farms. Key areas of interest include high-performance computing, LES, direct numerical simulations (DNS), and the development of innovative numerical algorithms. His computational achievements include simulating a fully bounded domain with nearly 100 billion grid points, which he accomplished during his ERC Starting Grant project. Richard earned his PhD, cum laude, from the University of Twente in 2011, where he studied turbulent Rayleigh-Bénard convection using DNS. After completing his doctoral studies, he was awarded a Young Energy Scientist Fellowship to investigate wind farm fluid mechanics at Johns Hopkins University. He returned to the Physics of Fluids group at the University of Twente in 2015 to work on the fluid mechanics of wind farms and novel simulations of turbulent flows.
