Edgar Choueiri

Professor Edgar Choueiri is Director of Princeton's Electric Propulsion and Plasma Dynamics Laboratory (EPPDyL) and the 3D Audio and Applied Acoustics (3D3A) Lab. He is tenured Full Professor in the Applied Physics Group at the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, and associated faculty at the Astrophysical Sciences Department/Program in Plasma Physics at Princeton University. 

He has been the Principal Investigator (PI) on more than 40 competitively selected research projects funded by NASA, AFOSR, the National Science Foundation, Tesla, and other governmental and private institutions. He has been PI and Co-PI on two space experiments onboard the Space Shuttle and the Russian scientific spacecraft APEX. Professor Choueiri's laboratory (EPPDyL) at Princeton University, a leading center of research in the field of advanced spacecraft propulsion, has been continuously funded by NASA since he became EPPDyL's Chief Scientist in 1996. Prof. Choueiri is the author of more than 220 journal articles, conference papers and encyclopedia articles on plasma thrusters, plasma physics, instabilities and turbulence in collisional plasmas, plasma accelerator modeling, space physics, acoustics, spatial audio and applied mathematics. 

He has been an invited speaker on more than 100 occasions at symposia and leading institutions around the world. He served as  President of the Electric Rocket Propulsion Society, and Chair of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' Electric Propulsion Technical Committee (EPTC) from 2002 to 2004, the two leading professional societies in his field.  He is the recipient of a number of awards and honors. including a knighthood from the President of Lebanon, his native land. He was elected President of the Lebanese Academy of Sciences in 2008.

He has developed a number of new undergraduate and graduate courses at Princeton University, advised more than a hundred undergraduate and graduate students, and graduated 19 Ph.D. students, 16 of whom are currently working as research scientists in plasma physics or space propulsion. In 2009 Professor Choueiri founded the 3D Audio and Applied Acoustics (3D3A) Lab, which has since generated many publications and patents including a new technique for producing tonally pure 3D sound from two loudspeakers. The new technology, called BACCH 3D Sound, licensed by Princeton University, is already being used in consumer audio and professional audio products. He and his work have been profiled in the BBC, The Discovery Channel, National Public Radio, The New Yorker magazine, The Atlantic magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Le Figaro, and various newspapers and magazines in the US, Europe, the Middle East and China.

Principal Research Efforts: 

Professor Choueiri's ongoing research projects are described at EPPDyL's website where there is a search engine that can be used to search and download many of the laboratory's hundreds of publications.