Peter Westervelt
Peter Westervelt was an American physicist, noted for his work in nonlinear acoustics, and Professor Emeritus of Physics at Brown University.
Education
Peter Jocelyn Westervelt was the son of US Army Brigadier General William I. Westervelt and Dorothy Westervelt, and the grandson of Brigadier General Stephen Perry Jocelyn. George Conrad Westervelt, a United States Navy officer and aviation pioneer, was his uncle. He received his BS in Physics from MIT in 1947, and his PhD in Physics from MIT in 1951, at which time he joined the Physics Department at Brown University.Career
Westervelt began his career in 1940-41 at the MIT Radiation Laboratory and the Harvard Underwater Sound Laboratory, where he worked with researchers including Frederick Vinton Hunt, Leo Beranek and Phillip Morse during the Second World War.During his long and distinguished career, he held responsible assignments with the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Research Council, and was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Acoustical Society of America, and the American Astronomical Society. He served as Assistant Attache for Research, U.S. Navy, at the American Embassy in London, U.K., and as a Consultant to Bolt, Beranek, and Newman. Westervelt also performed research at the University of Texas at Austin, where he developed new techniques, having widespread application, for the study of sound-by-sound scattering and the laser-excited thermoacoustics. Westervelt was awarded the Lord Rayleigh Medal in 1985, by the British Institute for Acoustics. He became Professor Emeritus at the Brown University Physics Department in 1989.