Edwin (Todd) Cowen

Edwin “Todd” Cowen is the Director of the DeFrees Hydraulics Laboratory and served as the Kathy Dwyer Marble and Curt Marble Faculty Director for Energy at the Atkinson Center for a Sustainability at Cornell University from 2013-2018. He joined the Cornell faculty in November 1997. Cowen earned a B.S. (1987) in civil engineering at Brown University. He worked for three years at Redniss and Mead, a Stamford, CT based consulting firm that specializes in site planning and engineering. It was at Redniss and Mead that Cowen got a taste for hydrology, hydraulics and environmental fluid mechanics. Cowen returned to school and completed his M.S. (1991) and Ph.D. (1997) in civil engineering at Stanford University specializing in environmental fluid mechanics.

Cowen’s research interests are in environmental fluid mechanics, renewable energy and sustainability. He pairs laboratory-based research with full-scale observational field campaigns to understand the physics of natural and anthropogenic flows in the environment. He has built an environmental fluid mechanics research program centered on five themes: environmental transport processes, water wave induced flows, lake hydrodynamics (physical limnology), energy harvesting, and quantitative imaging techniques.