John O. Dabiri

John Oluseun Dabiri is an American engineer and professor at the California Institute of Technology, where he holds appointments in aerospace engineering and mechanical engineering.

Dabiri studies biological fluid dynamics, including investigations of jellyfish propulsion. He has also developed and studied vertical-axis wind turbine systems inspired by observations of schooling fish.

Early life and education Born in 1980, Dabiri was raised in Toledo, Ohio, by Nigerian immigrant parents. During his childhood, Dabiri was exposed to engineering concepts through his father's technical work. He attended a Baptist high school where he received his high school diploma.

Dabiri graduated from Princeton University in 2001 with a B.S.E. degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering. He then went to Caltech for graduate studies, graduating with a Master of Science degree in Aeronautics in 2003, a Ph.D. in Bioengineering, and a minor in Aeronautics in 2005.

Career From 2005 to 2009, Dabiri worked as an assistant professor at Caltech in aeronautics and biological engineering. He was a senior fellow in Stanford's Center for Turbulence Research and founding director of the Catalyst for Collaborative Solutions initiative. Dabiri served on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) from 2021 to January 2025.

Dabiri serves on the Board of Directors of NVIDIA Corporation, the Board of Trustees of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the United States Secretary of Energy Advisory Board (SEAB), and as an advisor to X at Alphabet Inc. (formerly Google X). Additionally, he was the chair of the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics, and a member of the National Academies' Committee on Science, Technology, and Law. He served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics in 2016 and the Journal of the Royal Society Interface in 2014-2023.

Research

During his first tenure at Caltech, Dabiri was the director of the Biological Propulsion Laboratory. The lab conducted research on fluid transport applications in aquatic locomotion, fluid dynamic energy conversion, blood flow, and theoretical methods in fluid dynamics and vortex formation. He established the Caltech Field Laboratory for Optimized Wind Energy (FLOWE) in 2011, a wind farm that investigates energy exchange in an array of vertical-axis wind turbines. To further develop digital particle image velocimetry measurements of propulsion in aquatic animals, Dabiri and his student K. Katija designed and patented a device to measure the kinetic energy induced by swimming.

Noting constructive interference in the hydrodynamic wakes of schooling fish, his research suggested that extracting energy from flow vortices could aid more than locomotion. The design of an array of vertical-axis turbines was reported to increase power output per unit land area by more than an order of magnitude compared with horizontal-axis wind farms. Dabiri partnered with Windspire Energy for the use of three of the twenty-four turbines that stand approximately 30 feet tall and 4 feet wide. He founded Scalable Wind Solutions, a company focused on software for wind-turbine array placement optimization.

After returning to Caltech, Dabiri’s research has focused on the hydrodynamics of electromechanically modified jellyfish, which has been proposed as a mode for oceanographic sensing and exploration. Dabiri and colleagues have reported experiments in which low-power microelectronics were embedded in live jellyfish to modify propulsion and swimming behavior. An additional area of research in Dabiri’s lab focuses on the physics of turbulence transition. His recent work is exploring the role of the fluid-solid interface in theoretical predictions of turbulence transition.

Teaching Dabiri was named Professor of the Month at Caltech in February 2012. He has taught classes including a graduate class on propulsion, a biomechanics course, a lab class on experimental methods in aeronautics and applied physics, and the introduction to fluid mechanics course.

In an NPR interview, Dabiri discussed the role of early education and mentorship in STEM fields:

"Having two parents who encouraged me and, in some cases, forced me to study and to really take academics seriously was very important at an early stage. And then going through school, the role of my teachers was always so important. I remember my fourth-grade teacher ... [she] made me believe that I was smart and so I took that and sort of owned that and tried to live up to the expectations that she had placed on me, even as a fourth grader. And so we really want to grab hold of the imagination of the first graders and the second graders at a very early stage, and get them wondering about becoming scientists, as focused as they are about becoming a firefighter or the next rap star."

In 2010 Dabiri was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for his theoretical engineering work. That same year, he gave the Convocation Address at Caltech.

Bloomberg Businessweek magazine listed him among its 2012 Technology Innovators.

Dabiri was awarded the 2020 Alan T. Waterman Award from NSF. In 2023, he was awarded the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Award for aquatic sciences.

He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

Film consulting

In 2021, Dabiri served as a scientific consultant for Jordan Peele's science fiction film Nope. His role included advising on the design of the alien featured in the film, taking inspiration from the biology of marine invertebrates such as jellyfish and squid. The goal of the collaboration was to create an aerial predator with the ability to hide in the clouds (hence the scientific name of the fictional race: Occulonimbus edoequus), generate electric fields, and use electric propulsion.