Laurens unofficially started his engineering career in the United States Army, where he served in the 82nd Airborne Division from 1980-1983. Over the next six years he worked at Kaye Industries, functioning as the Vice President of Manufacturing and Plant Manager while earning a B.S.E. in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke University. He then continued his studies at Duke University where he earned a M.S. degree in 1991, and a Ph.D. in 1993, both in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. He subsequently joined the faculty in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science in the Pratt School of Engineering, where he is currently an Associate Professor of Engineering. He has held several interesting roles over the years including the Chair of the Engineering Faculty Council, Director of Graduate Studies, and Associate Chair of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science.In addition, he has served a Visiting Professor at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, primarily as a collaborator on several different research projects, many related to his expertise in fluid dynamics. In 1999, he received the very prestigious Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award. In addition, he has received research funding from the United States Navy (Naval Sea Systems Command), the American Chemical Society, the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the North Carolina Space Grant Consortium, the Lord Foundation, the Whittaker Foundation, the North Carolina Supercomputer Center, Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals, Inc., and Bracco Diagnostics, Inc. Laurens has published 23 papers in peer-reviewed journals, including a publication that received extensive press-coverage entitled “Leading-edge tubercles delay stall on humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) flippers” in Physics of Fluids.

Laurens E Howle research interests mainly focuses on Hydro elastic modeling of deformable structures, transport in thermal and chemical systems, experimental and computational fluid dynamics, nonlinear and complex systems, heat and mass transport in biological systems, stability of fluid motions, machine learning, data mining, econophysics, reduced order modeling, modeling of decompression sickness, pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, mechanical design, manufacturing engineering, wind power.