Warsi, Zahir U.

Zahir U. Warsi was born in India and migrated to USA in 1967 where he became a citizen in 1978. He obtained his BS, MS, and Ph.D degrees from the University of Lucknow in India before coming to USA. Both the MS and Ph.D degrees were earned in Applied Mathematics with specialization in Fluid Dynamics and in the Mathematical methods of Continuum Mechanics. From his Ph.D dissertation work alone he was able to publish five archive journal articles in single authorship. In the period between MS and Ph.D he was an instructor in a junior college teaching mathematics and physics for sixteen months, worked as a research assistant in photoelasticity and hydraulic research problems for three years, and worked as a Senior Scientific Officer in a Govt. Laboratory under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research for four years. After joining the faculty of Mississippi State University in 1967 he continued his research in the viscous flow problems involving both the laminar and turbulent flow conditions. Simultaneously, he worked in the areas of heat transfer, flow of non-Newtonian fluids, and spectral methods applied to elastic/structure problems. Besides the above areas he was one of the members of the original team involved in the development of the method of grid generation by numerical methods. His major contribution in the area of numerical grid generation is in the development of the most optimum set of partial differential equations for coordinate generation in curved surfaces of arbitrary forms. Further, his main thrust was to provide a systematic and constructive mathematical basis to the subject of Numerical Grid Generation.

Dr. Warsi has 41 archive journal articles, 12 MSSU-EIRS reports, 16 conference published presentations, 2 books, and 2 monographs to his credit. Since 1989 he has been named three times as Hearin-Hess Professor. He was also one of the original participants in the proposal to the NSF for the establishment of the ERC at MSU.

Since 1968 Dr. Warsi has taught both the undergraduate and the graduate courses in fluid dynamics and engineering mechanics. He has been invited to give talks at vaious places in the USA (e.g., Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Wright-Patterson Lab., ICASE at NASA Langley, etc.) and in the foreign countries. He was the recipient of the Minna-James-Heineman Foundation fellowship to spend one semester as a visiting Professor at the Von Karman Institute For Fluid Dynamics in Belgium. He was also invited by the Central Water and Power Research Station in Pune, India, under the United Nations Development Program.

Dr. Warsi became a Professor Emeritus in August 2002.