Inducted
Degrees
Eric Loth earned a BSAE from WVU in 1983, and a MSAE from Penn State in 1985. In 1988 he completed a study of supersonic bubbly jets for his PhD dissertation at the University of Michigan. From 1988 to 1989 he worked with Berkeley Research Associates in Springfield, Virginia, performing computational studies of blast wave propagation and shock-vortex interactions. During 1989-1990, he worked in the Naval Research Lab for Computational Physics and Fluid Dynamics in Washington, D.C. His work there was to develop numerical methods for analysis of the flow fields of spacecraft nozzles.
In 1990, Loth took his first academic position as an assistant professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Illinois in Champagne-Urbana. He was promoted to associate professor in 1995 and to professor in 2002. In 2002 he was named the Willett Faculty Scholar of the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Illinois. Loth has held visiting appointments at Cambridge University in the UK, the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Morgantown, Brown University, the University of California at San Diego, the Molten Metal Technology Corporation, the Naval Research Laboratory, Arnold Engineering and Development Center and Science Applications International Corporation. He has authored more than 75 archival journal articles and four monographs or book chapters. He holds three U.S. patents. He is an associate Fellow of the AIAA and associate editor of the journal Advances in Aerospace Science and Applications. Loth has served as the principal investigator or Co-PI on millions of dollars in sponsored research. He has graduated 25 MS students and seven PhD students, and has earned excellent teaching evaluations from his undergraduate students nearly every year. He was selected Teacher of the Year for the AAE Department in 1995.