Senior Team

Bill Dawes – Chief Executive Officer, Chairman, Chief Technical Officer

Bill Dawes is the Francis Mond Professor of Aeronautical Engineering at Cambridge University.  After completing a PhD at Cambridge he worked for the UK’s Central Electricity Generating Board where he developed and applied early computer-based flow simulation methods to steam turbine operational problems. Returning to Cambridge in 1984 he continued to work on a range of numerical methods – by now called CFD - aimed at predicting fully 3D viscous flow in turbomachines.  His blade-to-blade RANS code (BT0B3d) became an industry standard design tool and was licenced to over 50 companies & organisations around the world. He then broadened the application base beyond blading to shroud flows, secondary air systems and blade cooling and then on to geometry itself as a research theme. 

For the last 20 years his research has drawn inspiration from advanced computer graphics and physics-based animation and attempted to enable seamless and tactile integration between solid modelling, mesh generation, geometry editing and flow simulation.  The resulting software & environment, BOXER, is being developed by Cambridge Flow Solutions Ltd (of which Bill is a Founding Director, CTO and Chairman). Bill is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and of the Royal Aeronautical Society and is a Chartered Engineer.

Bill acts as CTO in CFS and actively contributes to code development in the company.

Mary Hickling - Chief Operating Officer

Mary is the Chief Operating Officer of Cambridge Flow Solutions Ltd (CFS) and is a Director & Company Secretary of CFS & BOXERsolutions Ltd and Director of BOXERsolutions USA, Inc and BoXeR Solutions kk in Kobe, Japan.  Before returning to Cambridge Mary had a variety of experiences including selling early mobile phones, working in an auction house, managing an estate agent office and running a yacht cleaning business.  Mary has been part of CFS since its formation in 1999, increasing her involvement to cover security, legal, financial and governance areas of company business.  She assists Bill with strategic and project planning and it’s management and led with him the development of CFS from 4-5 FTE in the early days to 17-18 now. Her key contributions are smooth financial management and maintaining positive cash flow! 

Carlos Vasco – Simulations Team Leader

Carlos studied aeronautical engineering in Madrid before spending a year in the Air Force, as a 2nd lieutenant, working in MRO quality-control at the pilot academy. He returned to the University of Madrid, as a research engineer, doing DNS & LES of turbulent flows, and collaborating with CTR at Stanford and other Universities. In 1999 he moved to ITP Aero (Rolls-Royce in Spain), as part of the Aerothermal methods department and for over 10 years contributed to the development of their in-house CFD solver, including numerics, boundary conditions, linear unsteady solver, multistage and  parallelization. As a senior CFD engineer he led the development of the flutter & noise design-systems, which were successfully applied to the design of the Low-Pressure Turbines of several current aeroengines. He introduced the use of PC clusters in the company and was in charge of their specification and operation.

Carlos joined Cambridge Flow Solutions Ltd. in 2011 as a senior CFD engineer, as the main developer of our in-house CFD solver NEWT. He is currently Simulations Team Leader, overseeing all the simulation related activities in the company. We continue developing our in-house CFD solver to extend its scope (Multiphysics/fluid-solid), keeping it highly parallel and removing all the bottlenecks through the entire design process (Geometry-CAD/Generative Design/AI->mesh->simulations-multi-fidelity/Multiphysics) in a coupled (in-memory/parallel) way (BOXERgeom/mesh/sim).

Venkata Chavata – BOXER Team Leader

Venkata Chavata is a Senior CAE Software Developer, leads BOXER development at Cambridge Flow Solutions Ltd and has over 17 years of experience in developing Geometry & Meshing tools. He studied Master of Technology (CAD/CAM) at IIT Bombay, India and between 2005 and 2019 worked in companies Tata Motors, Cranes Software Intl and Quest Global where he gained a rich expertise in End-to-End CAE software development. Some of the key projects he developed were Automatic Multi-Block Mesh generation for Gas Turbine components, Integration of In-house Meshing tools with commercial CAD tools like NX/SolidWorks and Customization of NX(plug-ins & UDF) for automated Parametrical design of Gas Turbine components.

After joining CFS in 2020, Venkata has developed RBF based Mesh Movement methods and In-memory Coupling of BOXER with in-house flow solver. Apart from being a key developer, he leads the overall BOXER software development with a long-term vision of creating solutions for Generative Design and Prognostics by leveraging AR/VR and AI/ML technologies. He holds key interests in other aspects of software development like Project Management, Quality control and Integration. He is a practitioner of Agile Scrum SDLC and is well versed with AS9100, CMM L5 standards.

Claire Thorby – Office Manager

Claire joined Cambridge Flow Solutions in 2021 as Office Manager where she oversees the smooth running of the office along with supporting IT and marketing, organising our attendance at conferences, assisting the Chief Operating Officer and generally helping where she can. She ensures the team are looked after through team lunches and trips out! Claire has been employed in Cambridgeshire for all of her working life and her varied career includes working as a Manager in a local Department Store, being a Church Centre Manager, working at local sports charity where she became Deputy Chief Executive for almost 6 years and running her own café.