SOCREF at Penn State: Dr. Deborah Levin: Biography
Deborah A. Levin has distinguished herself as an international authority in the multi-disciplinary research area of modeling and simulation of chemically reacting flows. Her personal technical and leadership contributions have had a strong impact on our national space surveillance policy and practice. After earning an undergraduate degree from The State University of New York at Stony Brook, Prof. Levin received her doctorate at the California Institute of Technology in the subject area of atomic and molecular physics. After graduation she worked at the Institute for Defense Analyses for nineteen years, serving as a task leader in the Science and Technology Division. She led and contributed to projects that ranged from the test and evaluation of tactical aircraft-borne electronic warfare equipment for the Office of the Secretary of Defense through space-borne detection in support of missile defense. Her research on the modeling and simulation and the use of ultraviolet radiation from the bow shock of a missile was cited by the Union of Concerned Scientists as a credible counter defense to the development of fast burn ICBMs. She played a key role as science leader in four space projects: the Bow-Shock Ultraviolet Flights I and II, the DEBI flight experiment, and the joint U.S.-Russian small satellite experiment Skipper, where her modeling of chemically reacting two-phase flows guided the design of scientific optical instruments for the aforementioned small rocket and satellite space experiments as well as post-mission data interpretation. Her analysis of these space flight data led to the discovery that state-of-the-art hypersonic radiation models under-predicted the bow-shock ultraviolet radiation by five orders of magnitude. This discovery had a profound impact on our national space surveillance policy, as well as the Aerospace Sciences community.
Professor Levin transitioned to academia in 1998 (George Washington University), and then to Penn State in 2000. Her research interests include a broad range of both traditional Aerospace Engineering topics as well as those in the areas of biological system interactions with flows (Defense Threat Reduction Agency), plasma reactor materials processing (the Semiconductor Research Corporation), and green electrospray propellants (AFOSR). Her research interests in core Aerospace Engineering projects span the areas of micro-propulsion, thermal protection materials, and spacecraft contamination, as well as, theoretical particle approaches to modeling extreme thermochemical nonequilibrium. In her modeling and simulation of micro-fluidic flows (AFOSR and NASA), she created the first predictive micro-nozzle thrust and heat transfer structural model of space-based microthruster array performance. In collaboration with researchers at NASA she developed a rigorous approach for on-orbit damage assessment of thermal protection material survivability in atomic oxygen-rich environments. Other research projects include coupled radiation modeling for aero-capture design for the NASA Stardust comet sample return mission, high altitude signatures for the Missile Defense Agency, and cluster formation processes in supersonic expansions for AFOSR and NSF. She has published over 300 publications (142 refereed and 170 conference papers) that have been cited approximately 500 times, and she has been an invited speaker at key international conferences and symposia. The uniqueness of her research in multi-scale problems has been recognized with three AIAA paper awards, demonstrating that complex aerospace problems can be tackled by fundamental chemistry approaches such as molecular dynamics and quasi-classical trajectory techniques. Her scholarly leadership inspires the community to incorporate, mature fundamental scientific tools in real world engineering problems.
A dedicated educator, Prof. Levin has taught approximately 1,000 undergraduate students since 1998, and has (co-) advised more than 30 graduate students, some of whom have won awards and gone on to positions of significant responsibility. Prof. Levin has taught freshman Chemistry, Spacecraft Environments, Physics of Gases, the Fundamentals of Fluid Flows, Incompressible and Compressible Aerodynamics, and Aerospace Analysis (numerical methods). The Spacecraft Environments course is unique in that students obtain hands-on experience with the Direct Simulation Monte Carlo method, thus preparing the future workforce of aerospace engineers in space surveillance