International Journal of Heat and Fluid Flow 27 (2006) 978–979
www.elsevier.com/locate/ijhﬀ

James Hunter Whitelaw – in Memoriam

On August 16th 2006 the world of experimental turbulent ﬂow and heat transfer lost one of its most powerfuland charismatic leaders after a long and characteristicallydogged battle against the progressive advance of motorneurone disease.
It might be said that Jim Whitelaw’s early development gave no clue that he would make such an impact inconvective ﬂows. After progressing through high school
he embarked upon a sandwich-course in Mechanical Engineering at Glasgow University followed by a graduate
apprenticeship with Rolls Royce. His undergraduate years
had kindled an appetite for research, however, and as soon
as possible he returned to his alma mater to follow a PhD
research programme on the viscosity of steam. This hecompleted in three years despite the distraction of marrying
just one year into that programme. Thereafter, in Julydoi:10.1016/j.ijheatﬂuidﬂow.2006.09.001

1961, he sailed to America to spend two years as a postdoc at Brown University continuing research on thermophysical properties with Professor Joseph Kestin.
Kestin had spent some time at Imperial College before
emigrating to the USA and it may have been that connection that led Brian Spalding, the then Professor of Heat
Transfer at Imperial, to recruit Whitelaw as the experimentalist among the growing academic team he was assembling. But Spalding wasn’t interested in thermophysicalproperties so Jim re-directed his research to ﬁlm cooling,
the starting point of a new phase in his research that wasto last the remainder of his professional life and during
the course of which he would author over 400 refereed
technical publications and supervise over 80 successful
PhD students. His progress at Imperial was rapid, withhis gaining promotion to Reader in 1969 and to Professor

James Hunter Whitelaw – in Memoriam / Int. J. Heat and Fluid Flow 27 (2006) 978–979

of Convective Heat Transfer in 1974. He led the Fluids(and later Thermo-ﬂuids) Section at Imperial for nearly
25 years and, over most of two decades, served on theDepartment’s senior management committee as FinanceDirector.
Undoubtedly, the most important research initiative heled was in laser-Doppler anemometry. He didn’t invent
the technique but, at the start of the 1970’s, LDA was justan emerging research tool requiring hours to align the individual optical components. Together with his outstanding
research student, Franz Durst, and, later, Adrian Melling,
he took the instrumentation and packaged it into a recognizable precursor of the commercial instruments that were
to become available a few years downstream. The same
three authors were also to write the ﬁrst and highly inﬂuential textbook on the subject. With this major shift to optical
instrumentation, his research on applications likewise progressed to velocity and turbulence measurements in far
more complex ﬂows than could be explored with hot-wireanemometry, the performance of combustion chambers,both in gas turbines and internal combustion engines,
becoming a particular interest.
Perhaps triggered by his period as a post-doc at Brown,
Jim became an inveterate traveller, initially mainly to theUSA but later also to the Far-East and to Southern Europe. In 1977, with Durst and two of the editors of this journal (BEL and FWS), he helped organize the ﬁrst Turbulent
Shear Flow Symposium at the Pennsylvania State University. While conceived as a one-oﬀ event, the meeting clearlyﬁlled a need and so a further ten biennial symposia in thisseries were held. A little later he helped breathe into existence the series of conferences on the Application of Laser-based Methods to Fluid Mechanics held at theGulbenkian Institute in Lisbon, a series which continues
to this day. In addition to conferences he also contributed
to more than eighty short courses, some two thirds ofwhich were held in overseas universities. In 1983, with979

Wolfgang Merzkirch, he persuaded Springer to found thejournal Experiments in Fluids, a publication that again precisely matched the needs of the moment and which grew,under their editorship, to one of the most respected journals in the ﬂuid ﬂow arena.
These numerous and diverse contributions won him
widespread recognition abroad, a fact reﬂected by: his honorary degrees from the technical universities of Lisbon,
Valencia and Athens and from Trinity College, Dublin;by his being awarded the international Nusselt-Reynolds
Prize; by his holding visiting professorships at UC Berkeley, Arizona State University, the University of Minnesota
and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University; and by hiselection as a Foreign Associate to the US National Academy of Engineering.
Besides these overseas awards, he was by no means
unrecognized at home, being elected a Fellow of The Royal
Society, The Royal Academy of Engineering and The City
& Guilds of London Institute. Some felt it odd that, withhis exceptional talents for sizing up a situation and taking
decisive, clearly-thought-out actions, he had never become
Head of Department at Imperial College. Indeed, on morethan one occasion he had been approached to take on thatrole but each time he declined, conﬁding to a friend that hewas happy with being just the Department’s Finance Director since ‘‘he who controls the purse strings controls theDepartment!’’
Yes, in some respects, James Whitelaw was, indeed, theepitome of a canny Scot, as that remark suggests . . . but hewas so much more besides.
Thomas Gatski
Nobuhide Kasagi
Brian LaunderFrank Schmidt
Available online 7 November 2006