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Douglas Carter

Douglas Carter

Assistant Professor

Douglas W. Carter is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UW-Madison and the head of the Experimental Turbulent Flows Lab (ETFL).

He earned his BS degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Hampshire in 2014, and an MS and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics from the University of Minnesota in 2017 and 2019, respectively. He held two postdoctoral positions, one at the University of Southampton in Southampton, UK and one at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, NM.

He is an expert in turbulent flows at both subsonic and supersonic speeds as well as in numerous experimental diagnostics and data-driven methods. He is a member of the American Physical Society (APS) and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) where he is an active member of the Aerodynamic Measurement Technologies (AMT) technical committee.

He is the recipient of a 2026 AFOSR Young Investigator Program (YIP) award.

Department

Mechanical Engineering

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Focus on new faculty: Douglas Carter studies the role of turbulence in aerospace applications

September 18, 2026

  • PhD 2019, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
  • MS 2017, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
  • BS 2014, University of New Hampshire

  • Turbulent flows
  • Compressible flows
  • Measurement diagnostics
  • Unsteady aerodynamics
  • Data-driven methods
  • Data assimilation
  • Multiphase flows

  • Schuabb, M., Duan, L., Scholten, A., Paredes, P., Choudhari, M. M., Carter, D., Casper, K. M., & Wagnild, R. M. (2026). Boundary-Layer Transition Over a Smooth Circular Cone at Non-Zero Angle of Attack in a Mach 8 Digital Wind Tunnel. In AIAA SCITECH 2026 Forum (p. 1924).
  • Carter, D., Gragston, M., Leonov, B. S., Parziale, N., & Rodrigues, N. S. (2026). Recent Developments and Applications of Molecular Tagging Velocimetry for High-Speed Flow Measurements. In AIAA SciTech 2026 Forum (p. 0672).
  • Benitez, E. K., Bisek, N. J., & Carter, D. (2026). Direct density measurements from intersectional FLDI. Optics Letters, 51(12), 3361-3364.
  • Moaven, M., & Carter, D. (2026). Helium-filled soap bubbles as flow tracer particles: a review. Experiments in Fluids, 67(9), 122.
  • Zhang, Y., Moaven, M., Banjade, S., Carter, D., Cattafesta, L., & Schmid, P. (2026). T-PRIME: Taylor Physics-Regularized Inference for Mapping Eulerian Fields from PTV Data.
  • Moaven, M., & Carter, D. (2025). Application of Helium-Filled Soap Bubbles Towards Double-exposure Multi-pulse 3D/3C Velocimetry in a Turbulence Chamber. In 78th Annual Meeting of the Division of Fluid Dynamics.
  • Carter, D., Pehrson, J. C., Bhakta, R., Spillers, R., & Beresh, S. J. (2025). Hypersonic FLEET Velocimetry on a Three-Dimensional Expansion-Compression Geometry. In AIAA SCITECH 2025 Forum (p. 1838).
  • Beresh, S. J., Swain, W., Pehrson, J. C., Pandey, A., & Carter, D. (2025). Velocimetry of Expansion-Compression Geometries in High-Speed Flows. In 16th International Symposium on Particle Image Velocimetry - ISPIV.
  • Carter, D., Spillers, R., Pehrson, J. C., Bhakta, R., Richardson, D. R., & Beresh, S. (2024). Development of time-domain femtosecond laser electronic excitation tagging via linear photodiode arrays. In AIAA SCITECH 2024 Forum (p. 2324).
  • Beresh, S. J., Pandey, A., Richardson, D. R., Carter, D., Saltzman, A. J., & Casper, K. M. (2024). Implementation of Optical Diagnostics for Study of a Non-Canonical Hypersonic Geometry. In 21st International Symposium on the Application of Laser and Imaging Techniques to Fluid Mechanics.