Derek Tretheway is an associate professor in the thermal and fluid science group in the mechanical engineering department of the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science. Tretheway did undergraduate research while earning a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.
He got a summer research position with a faculty member his junior year and, realizing how much he enjoyed the work, he continued researching into his senior year.
“That’s kind of what made me decide to go to graduate school,” Tretheway said. He ended up going to the University of California, Santa Barbara, to get his doctoral degree in chemical engineering.
He shifted his research from chemical engineering to mechanical engineering by doing his postdoctoral work with a new mechanical engineering professor at Santa Barbara.
“Together, we were looking at flows at a micro scale,” Tretheway said. They were measuring flows and trying to see if the things happening in normal-sized flows were still occurring at the micro scale, and it turned out they were not.
“There were some reasons to believe they weren’t because now their surface effects were so large relative to the volume,” Tretheway said. He said this work is what got him into micro fluids, which is what he is researching now.
Tretheway is currently teaching many classes at different levels in the department. He teaches junior-level required courses on topics like thermodynamics and fluid dynamics. He also teaches some senior-level classes and graduate courses in mass transfer, fluid mechanics and microfluidics, which is his primary research area.
Though the field encompasses many aspects, he explained that it’s basically the study of very small volumes and the fluid mechanics of these small things. One of the questions he focuses on is how to move fluids through these small structures efficiently.
He mentioned that a big part of microfluidics is the fact that you have a “lab on a chip.” It’s not really that small, but the whole instrumentation usually takes up just a tabletop, as opposed to an entire lab needed in other fields.
Tretheway said that while looking at industry and faculty jobs, Portland just came up out of the blue.
“I didn’t know much about PSU. To be honest, I didn’t even know it existed,” Tretheway said. But there was a position open in thermal fluid sciences and, since he had the background, he applied.
“When I came up and visited, I liked the feel of the university. It reminded me of Santa Barbara before it really took off. It was sort of like it was ready to take off. And it is still going that way. It’s taking off, I think. I had that feeling and I like that feeling,” Tretheway said.
He also enjoys Portland, and the area surrounding the city.
“I’m pretty much an outdoorsman. If it’s outdoors, I probably do it,” Tretheway said. He fishes, hunts, crabs, hikes and occasionally goes camping. He said he tries to ride his bike to and from work as much as possible. He loves to just get outside and do things, and he has two small children that keep him busy.