A special Symposium on Turbulence and Combustion is to be held at Cornell University in Ithaca NY, on August 3-4, 2009. The overall goal of the symposium is to promote future advances in the study of turbulence and combustion, through a forum intended to foster interactions between leading members of these two research communities. The symposium program will consist of twelve invited lectures given by world-class experts in the field, two poster sessions, an open forum, and other informal activities to encourage discussion. NSF funds are requested primarily to provide travel support for younger participants accompanying academic invitees in the US. Arrangements have been made to publish a special issue of peer-reviewed articles from the symposium in the journal Flow, Turbulence and Combustion, with two members of the Symposium Program Committee designated as guest editors. The symposium contributions include work on turbulent dispersion, wall-bounded flows, mixing, finite-rate chemistry, and others, using experiment, modeling, and computations, and will include perspectives from an international community of leading researchers from academia, national laboratories, and industry. The organizers' ability to bring together this group of world-class experts and promising young researchers is enabled by the presence of Professor Stephen B. Pope at Cornell. Professor Pope's special contributions and scholarly influence on both fields will be appropriately recognized in an informal manner. Discussion periods and an open forum are expected to generate new impetus towards cross-community collaborations between researchers in turbulence and combustion. Younger members of our research community in attendance are likely to find inspiration through close interaction with top experts from around the world at the symposium. Finally, long term impact will be achieved via the electronic medium of a website, and a more traditional special volume publication in a journal of relatively broad scope cutting across disciplinary boundaries. The symposium will present new opportunities for rigorous study of the scientific complexities of turbulent combustion, which accounts for a large fraction of the world's energy production, and has significant impact on environmental quality worldwide.
