Dr Rhea Liem is a Reader in Sustainable Aviation at the Department of Aeronautics, and a member of the Brahmal Vasudevan Institute for Sustainable Aviation. Her research focuses on aerospace computation, specifically in the application of computational science and advanced computing capabilities to support sustainable aviation goals through innovations in aircraft design and air transportation, while taking their interdependence into account.

Beyond designing environmentally-friendly aircraft, analysing and designing the next-generation air transportation require simultaneous considerations of operational changes, technological changes, adoption of alternative fuels, and policy changes. However, to date, most of their analyses and optimisation are still siloed, thereby hindering the achievement of a truly optimum system with a comprehensive consideration of all aspects. Dr Liem’s research is aimed to develop an “operation-aware” aircraft design framework to replace the naive, conventional framework that relies on simplifying assumptions and nominal conditions. Results have shown that by optimising the aircraft over its relevant flight operating envelope, the overall fuel efficiency improvements – across various flight missions – can be achieved. Such a modelling and optimisation approach requires the infusion of data – to represent operational variations – into physics-based models. This effort fits into the fourth paradigm of science, which focuses on data exploration and seeks to unify data, theory, and simulation. Similarly, the data-driven, operation-based optimisation framework has also been developed and implemented in air transportation operation (e.g., in trajectory optimisation and arrival sequencing), to incorporate realistic air traffic constraints and aircraft-system characteristics in the modelling and optimisation. Her research is expected to contribute to bridging the gap between the fundamental development of computational science and its real-world implementations.

She is a 2012 Amelia Earhart Fellow, which is awarded to women in aerospace research, and also a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society.