Mystery Image #9 is Professor Robert Mayle of the Mechanical Engineering Dept with Graduate Student Bill Bellows '78. Early 1980's in the wind tunnel laboratory in the Ricketts Building. I grew up with Bill and my eventual wife (Cindy Poslusny)worked in the same research group.

This is the fastest response yet! I really didn't expect an identification of the student. Thanks so much for sharing your comment. The personal context makes this much more interesting!

Off-hand, this photo was taken during the summer of 1980, the first summer of my doctoral research with Prof, Mayle. If you look closely at the meter readout above his left hand, you'll see a zeroed reading, further evidence of a staged photo. What's amazing is how intense he's looking at the equipment. As for the equipment, the lower box in front of Prof. Mayle's hand is the electronics for a hot-wire anemometer, used to measure air speed in the wind tunnel behind the equipment. Next up is filtering equipment used to post-process the hot-wire signal. The role of the top box is beyond my memory, but I do recall the role of the large box in front of me. This device controlled the vertical position of the hot-wire probe in 0.001 inch increments. The equipment behind Prof. Mayle is a series of power supplies that were used to provide a constant current to the heater elements on the test body in our heat transfer experiments. Hope this helps.