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The Prandtl Medal is awarded once every two years by the European Community on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences (ECCOMAS).

The presentation took place during the biennial held in Norway from 5 to 9 June. A special aspect of this edition was the celebration of the organization's 30th anniversary. "So it was a memorable meeting in more ways than one", said Van Brummelen, who looks back on the event with appropriate pride and of course on the recognition for his work in particular. "Usually, awards and recognitions are mostly about contributions to specific applications and not so much about more generic, fundamental research such as I am involved in. That makes this medal especially valuable to me."

The Prandtl Medal is awarded for outstanding, structural contributions in the field of computational fluid dynamics. Nominations are submitted by members of the ECCOMAS community, and an independent committee of former laureates and representatives of subdisciplines from the field determines the final selection. "My research is at the core of the theme of ECCOMAS: developing models and computational methods to solve problems in mechanics and physics", explains Van Brummelen. "In particular, I focus on problems where the flow exhibits an interface, for example if the fluid consists of two different components, or if the fluid interacts with an adjacent solid."

On the latter topic, he made a number of important contributions in recent years. "Historically, fluid mechanics and solid-state mechanics have often been considered separately, but in recent years there has been an increasing realization that many issues can only be solved when the two disciplines are combined. It is precisely these interfaces and the theoretical insights that arise from them that have always been at the heart of my work. I think that was also an important argument for awarding me the Prandtl Medal: after the era of analysis, in which we unraveled complex problems into small sub-issues, we now live in the era of synthesis, in which we have to figure out how the pieces fit together again. This shows that the interaction between different disciplines is essential to move forward with new technologies."