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Professor Kurosaka received his BS and MS from the University of Tokyo and PhD from the California Institute of Technology. After graduation from Cal Tech in 1968, he worked in industry, first at AiResearch Manufacturing Company and then at General Electric Research and Development Center. In 1977, he returned to academia and joined the faculty at the University of Tennessee Space Institute where he became a professor in 1979. Under the support of the Air Force and MIT, he spent a year at MIT as a visiting professor in 1984-85. He joined the faculty at the University of Washington in 1987. He is Fellow of ASME and the first recipient of the Professor of the Year Award (1993) of the Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics.

His interests are thermo-fluid problems related to advanced airbreathing propulsion and vortex dynamics. His early credits in the technical-area-first include the diagnosis/analysis of multiple pure tone noise and supersonic flutter of high speed turbofan blades. He then succeeded in pinning down the mechanism of the Ranque-Hilsch effect, the results of which were published by the American Physical Society in Physics News in 1983. As a result, he received the AIAA General H.H. (Hap) Arnold Award. Next he and co-workers explained the mechanism of Eckert-Weise effect. In the area of vortex-induced enhancement of turbine cooling, he and his students made contributions in the areas of impingement- and film cooling and along the way uncovered energy separation in large-scale structures and the presence of anti-kidney vortices in cross flow jets. He also elucidated the mechanism of vortex breakdowns, for which he and his students developed self-induction theory substantiated by experiments. Currently, he is developing a theory of spinning detonation and extending it to continuous detonation engines.

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