(soft music) - I was always interested, as a kid, in airplanes, how things fly.

(jet engine roars) In class, I was always drawing pictures of unusual shapes of air forts, or even weird spacecraft looking things.

You know, I thought, oh, this would look nice.

If somebody could make this, (soft music plays) If you look at how airplanes fly, you have flow of air over wings that generate the lift.

So that's aerodynamics and there's always a flow air involved.

So that's a part of fluid flow.

We study fluid flow phenomenon and the reasons we study him, because we like to understand it well enough so we can alter their behavior deliberately.

So we make models of these things, a wing, for example, and we put them in a water tunnel.

We look at his four characteristics.

We look at his forces, lift, drag, we move it we pitch it.

And we see what happens to the flow around it, the forces, how do they change?

Why do they change that way?

Why is that important?

Because you learn how fish propel themselves, how do birds propel themselves, how do they navigate themselves?

The discovery is really what drives us to like.

You're always asking why does it do this?

(upbeat music plays) David on the digital delay generator, what parameters you just set for the frame rates?

When it comes to research in our lab, I typically have a very hands-off approach with my students.

I want them to make the discoveries on their own.

- The rep rate is at 20 Hertz with a delay time of 13 milliseconds.

- All of my students, I call them my academic children.

So it's like having your own kids being successful.

You're proud of them.

Right now we're working with researchers and collaborators at NASA Glenn to find a way to measure the temperature in this very volatile liquid, because the mechanism of heat transfer in space.

When you have micro gravity is fundamentally different compared to earth.

For space travel, If you want to go long mission, long distance, long duration of space, you need to solve this problem of storage tanks of these kinds of fluids.

I think my younger son has inherited some of my curiosity toward these aerospace systems.

He used to draw these intricate detailed drawings of aircraft, and when he finished high school, he said that that he wants to become an aerospace engineer.

My goal is to have the new generation be better than me.

I want them to grow as a result of that process themselves and become mature researchers on their own.

It's very nice to people at MSU or recognized the efforts that I've made.

It's just, its just great.

(upbeat music plays)