Professor Colm-cille Caulfield

Colm-cille P. Caulfield is Professor of Environmental and Industrial Fluid Dynamics in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) at the University of Cambridge, and a faculty member of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Flows (IEEF).

He is also a Professorial Fellow in Mathematics at Churchill College, Cambridge, and the Co-Director (Science) of the University’s Institute of Computing for Climate Science (ICCS), which studies and supports the role of software engineering, computer science, AI and data science within climate science. 

His undergraduate studies were at the University of Ulster at Coleraine, graduating with a BSc in Mathematics in 1987. He then studied for his Master's and PhD in Fluid Mechanics at DAMTP under the supervision of Prof Paul Linden FRS, defending his thesis on stratified shear instabilities in 1991. 

Following postdoctoral training in the Department of Physics at the University of Toronto and the Department of Engineering Science at Hokkaido University, he was a lecturer in the School of Mathematics at the University of Bristol from January 1995 to June 1999. 

Prof. Caulfield subsequently joined the faculty of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego for the period July 1999 to June 2005. Following tenure at UCSD, Prof. Caulfield joined the BP Institute (now IEEF) and  DAMTP in July 2005. Prof. Caulfield is the Editor (-in-Chief) of the Journal of  Fluid Mechanics, and served as the Head (ie Dept Chair) of DAMTP from January 2020 to September 2025. He was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society (Division of Fluid Dynamics) in 2014.