This morning I have the privilege and the pleasaure of introducing the 2005 Weissenberg Award recipient, Professor Roland Keunings. Roland is based at the Center for Systems Engineering and Applied Mechanics (CESAME) at the Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.

My own association with that prestigious institution goes back almost thirty years, the initial contact being Professor Marcel Crochet, of course. Over the years, I have examined at least 20 phD theses from the CESAME group and I well remember being impressed by one of the early PhD candidates by the name of Roland Keunings; that was in 1982. Even then, I felt that this man was ‘going places”. How right I was!

Of course, in one sense, the going places was geographical and Roland spent 5 very productive years at the University of Berkeley in California, working with Professor Morton Denn and others.

But the ‘going place” I had in mind at that time referred to his basic research potential.

On his return to Belgium in 1988, Roland quickly complemented and indeed extended the already strong international reputation of the CESAME group in Computational Rheology.

As most of you will know, Professor Crochet became Rector of the University in the mid 90s and in one sense Roland Keunings seems to be going in the same direction. He has already taken on a substantial administrative role, but within a research environment I am glad to say, and there is no sign of a let up in his research output.

So, what of the present? In my opinion, Roland Keunings is the leading rheologists of his generation in Europe. He is now at the peak of his achievements and he heads one of the few outstanding academic groups devoted to rheology in Europe, one that is renowned everywhere for its continuing contributions to computational techniques and software development.

Roland is also the Co Executive Editor (along with Gareth Mckinley) of the Journal of non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics, the leading international journal for the subject.

He is an outstanding teacher and presenter of his own, and other scientists’, work : his lectures and talks at conferences are models of careful preparation and effective presentation, and they are invariably stimulating.

Roland’s list of over 100 publications contains many that have had a profound impact on the international community. Allow me to list a few examples :

1. He developed the first numerical methods capable of predicting the flow of long-range memory fluids in a variety of complex flow problems, including some with free boundaries.
2. His next and most innovatice contributions were concerned with what can loosely be called the kinetic theory of polymer solutions and he has become the leading exponent of micro-macro techniques.
3. His most recent work has been in connection with tube models for entangled polymer liquids and in providing numerical solutions, which avoid some of the difficulties inherent in the use of macroscopic integrodifferential constitutive equations.

And I could go on! But I believe I have said enough. I give you Professor Roland Keunings – as a very worthy recipient of the Weissenberg Award of the European Society of Rheology