Edwin "Todd" Cowen is the Director of the DeFrees Hydraulics Laboratory and served as the Kathy Dwyer Marble and Curt Marble Faculty Director for Energy at the Atkinson Center for a Sustainability at Cornell University from 2013-2018. He joined the Cornell faculty in November 1997. Cowen earned a B.S. (1987) in civil engineering at Brown University. He worked for three years at Redniss and Mead, a Stamford, CT based consulting firm that specializes in site planning and engineering. It was at Redniss and Mead that Cowen got a taste for hydrology, hydraulics and environmental fluid mechanics. Cowen returned to school and completed his M.S. (1991) and Ph.D. (1997) in civil engineering at Stanford University specializing in environmental fluid mechanics.
Cowen's research interests are in environmental fluid mechanics, renewable energy and sustainability. He pairs laboratory-based research with full-scale observational field campaigns to understand the physics of natural and anthropogenic flows in the environment.
Cowen believes strongly in multidisciplinary, cross-university collaborative research in the broad area of sustainability. Cowen has a particular interest in collaborating with external partners for real-world impact, such as his work with Avangrid (parent company of New York State Electric and Gas Corporation) to create, test, and optimize new residential electric storage systems as part of the Energy Smart Community initiative. This cutting-edge academic-private industry National Science Foundation sponsored collaboration is testing whether coupling rechargeable batteries to residential smart meters can increase benefits, including bolstering power grid flexibility, integrating renewable energy sources, reducing household electricity costs, and empowering homeowners to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
Cowen has been a member since 1999 of the Technical Advisory Committee on Cornell's Lake Source Cooling project, an award-winning district cooling system, and is a member of the executive steering team for Cornell's innovative Earth Source Heat project which seeks to tap deep geothermal energy to heat Cornell’s campus. He was a member of Cornell's Senior Leadership Climate Action Group, which issued the report "Options for Achieving a Carbon Neutral Campus by 2035". He is recognized as an authority in the areas of experimental measurements in fluid flows, environmental fluid mechanics, and sustainable energy and is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Experiments in Fluids, Environmental Fluid Mechanics, and Energies.