For a lifetime of pioneering work in fluid mechanics, first at Monash and then at the University of Melbourne, David Boger receives the 2005 Prime Minister’s Prize for Science.

University of Illinois Meet Our Alumni - David Boger, PhD ’65, Fluid mechanics pioneer. “I always felt that I should be doing two things,” Boger said during his Fall 2015 visit to Illinois for a Distinguished Alumni Lecture. One is, more or less, research that he wanted to do—if he could fund it, and back in the ’60s and ’70s, that wasn’t a problem.

Professor Boger is world-renowned for his discovery of constant viscosity elastic liquids (Boger fluids) which were synthesised to better understand how non-Newtonian fluids behave. David Boger’s detailed experimental investigations directly advanced the field of fluid mechanics, allowing the definition of fluid elasticity effects in atomisation, the delivery of agricultural chemicals, in polymer processing, and in the linking of basic surface chemistry to the continuum properties and the processing of particulate fluids.

University of Melbourne Emeritus Laureate Professor David Boger, who pioneered constant viscosity elastic liquids – now universally known as Boger fluids.