Dr. David Marshall is currently the chair of the Aerospace Engineering Department. His current areas of interest include the development of CFD and lower fidelity modeling techniques to rapidly predict aerodynamic performance, hypersonics and high-speed aerodynamics, and a variety of software development topics related to high-performance computing and general scientific computing.

Dr. David Marshall attended Worcester Polytechnic Institute where he earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering with an interest in Aerospace Engineering. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech where his areas of research were computational fluid dynamics (CFD) algorithms and techniques, high speed flows, and high-performance computing. His Ph.D. thesis was on the extension of unstructured Cartesian CFD algorithms to viscous flow modeling and distributed memory parallelization. He studied under Dr. Stephen Ruffin at Georgia Tech, helping to develop the CFD code NASCART-GT, and Mr. Michael Aftosmis at NASA Ames, helping to implement the distributed memory version of Cart3D.

Dr. Marshall spent several years in the industry working on a number of aerospace projects before joining Cal Poly. Some of these projects included modeling the various aspects of electric propulsion thrusters for spacecraft, high temperature and high pressure flows associated with rocket combustion chambers, and object-oriented software development techniques for scientific computing.

Dr. Marshall started as an assistant professor in the Aerospace Engineering Department at Cal Poly in 2004. He has taught a number of classes in aerodynamics, fluid dynamics, and CFD at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Along with his collaborators, Dr. Marshall has participated in a number of research activities involving students at the undergraduate and graduate levels. These efforts have resulted in many valuable collaboration experiences for students and have led to over 40 M.S. degrees. Since 2016, Dr. Marshall has been the chair of the Aerospace Engineering Department where he gets to facilitate collaborations between the department and the industry and is helping to guide the department into the future of aerospace engineering.