Joel E. Tohline

Joel Edward Tohline (born July 15, 1953) is an American astrophysicist, specializing in computer simulation of complex fluid flows in astrophysical systems.

Education and career Tohline went to high school in New Orleans. He graduated in 1974 with a B.S. in physics from Centenary College of Louisiana and in 1978 with a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Santa Cruz. His thesis is entitled Fragmentation of Rotating Protostellar Clouds. As a postdoc he was from 1978 to 1980 a Willard Gibbs Instructor in Yale University's astronomy department and from 1980 to 1982 a postdoctoral fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory. In Louisiana State University's department of physics and astronomy, he was from 1982 to 1986 an assistant professor, from 1986 to 1990 an associate professor, and from 1990 to 2002 a full professor and is since 2002 to the present Alumni Professor. In 1987 he used Blake Van Leer's invention for creating 3-dimensional hydrodynamic computer code. While at LSU, he created numerous textbooks on mathematical tools and the physical concepts, white dwarfs and neutron stars. From 1994 to 1997 he was chair of the department. He was from January to May 2000 a visiting associate in astronomy at California Institute of Technology. From 2010 to the present he is the director of the LSU Center for Computation & Technology.

Selected publications

Christodoulou, D. M., Shlosman, I., & Tohline, J. E. (1994). A New Criterion for Bar-Forming Instability in Rapidly Rotating Gaseous and Stellar Systems. I. Axisymmetric Form. arXiv preprint astro-ph/9411031.https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9411031