Petia Vlahovska

Petia Vlahovska
Петя Влаховска
Born	1972 or 1973 (age 51–52)
Occupation	Engineer
Awards	Fellow of the American Physical Society (2019) Guggenheim Fellow (2024)
Academic background
Alma mater	Sofia University Yale University
Thesis	Dynamics of a surfactant-covered drop and the non-Newtonian rheology of emulsions (2003)
Doctoral advisor	Jerzy Blawzdziewicz Michael Loewenberg
Academic work
Sub-discipline	Biophysical engineering Fluid mechanics
Institutions	Brown University Dartmouth College Northwestern University

Petia Mladenova Vlahovska (born circa 1973) is a Bulgarian engineer specializing in biophysics and fluid mechanics. A 2019 Fellow of the American Physical Society and 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, she is a professor at the McCormick School of Engineering Department of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics.

Biography

Vlahovska was born in around 1973 to engineer parents. Moving from her native northern Bulgaria, she obtained her MSc (1994) in Chemistry at Sofia University, where she later started her postgraduate studies as a research associate at their Laboratory of Chemical Physics and Engineering. She later moved across the Atlantic Ocean to Yale University, where she obtained her MS in Chemical Engineering (1999), MPhil in Mechanical Engineering (2001), and PhD in Chemical Engineering (2003); her doctoral dissertation Dynamics of a surfactant-covered drop and the non-Newtonian rheology of emulsions was supervised by Jerzy Blawzdziewicz and Michael Loewenberg. She was later a David Crighton Fellow (2004-2005) at the University of Cambridge Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.

After visiting positions as an assistant professor at the Brown University School of Engineering (2003-2005) and a scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces Theory and Bio-systems Department (2005-2006), she moved to Dartmouth College's Thayer School of Engineering in 2006 and became assistant professor. In 2010, she returned to Brown, while retaining an adjunct assistant professor position at the Thayer School of Engineering until 2011 and Dartmouth's department of physics until 2012; she was promoted from assistant professor to associate professor in 2013. She moved to Northwestern University (where she had been a visiting scholar from 2014 to 2015) in 2017 and was promoted there to professor in 2020. At Northwestern, she has also been part of the Northwestern-Argonne Institute of Science and Engineering.

She and her research group research biological and physical systems through theoretical and experimental models. She teaches classes in fluid mechanics and biophysics, as well as in applied mathematics and vector calculus. In 2016, she was awarded the Humboldt Research Award. In 2019, she was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society for "pioneering work on problems in interfacial flows and soft matter, including the fluid-structure interaction in Stokes flow, the mechanics of biomembranes, and electrohydrodynamics." She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2024; she intends to use the Fellowship to do research on the use of active fluids in cytological microbotics.