Professor John Chaplin is an Emeritus Professor within Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Southampton.
He graduated in Civil Engineering at the University of Bristol in 1967 and obtained a PhD from the same department three years later.
After a research assistant post in hydromechanics at Karlsruhe University, Germany, he joined Rendel Palmer and Tritton, consulting engineers, London, where he supervised research on flow-induced vibrations of the rising sector gates of the Thames Barrier.
In 1974 he was appointed Lecturer in Civil Engineering at the University of Liverpool, where he worked on wave loading on offshore structures and developed a track record for innovative large scale laboratory experiments.
In 1985 he moved to British Maritime Technology Ltd as a research engineer in the same field, and a year later was appointed to the Chair of Hydraulics at City University London.
After well-funded research on a wide range of problems in fluid-structure interaction he became Professor of Applied Fluid Mechanics at the University of Southampton in 1999, where he specialises in water wave mechanics, vortex-induced vibrations, and wave energy conversion. He is no longer taking on research assistants or students.