Professor Pope received his undergraduate and graduate education in the Mechanical Engineering Department of Imperial College, London. His Ph.D. research was concerned with turbulent flows and included measurements using Laser-Doppler anemometry, numerical calculation of turbulent flows, and the development of the PDF method for turbulent combustion. He received the Unwin Prize, awarded annually for the best Ph.D. thesis in the College of Engineering.
After spending two post-doctoral years at Imperial College, Professor Pope came to the United States in 1977 as Research Fellow in Aeronautics in the Applied Mathematics Department of the California Institute of Technology. A year later he joined the Mechanical Engineering faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The three and a half years at MIT were spent primarily developing new Monte Carlo methods for solving PDF transport equations for turbulent reactive flows.
Since 1982 Professor Pope has been at Cornell University where he is the Sibley College Professor. In addition to PDF methods, his research activities include stochastic modeling of turbulence phenomena, direct numerical simulations of turbulence, and computational methods for combustion chemistry. Professor Pope is a Fellow of the Royal Society, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the American Physical Society, and of the Institute of Physics.
Professor Pope has written the graduate text book Turbulent Flows (Cambridge University Press, 2000) has published over one hundred and seventy research papers (see list of publications) and has presented his work in invited talks to national meetings of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics,the Society of Engineering Science, and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. He presented invited plenary lectures at the Twenty-Third Symposium (International) on Combustion, and at the Forty-Third Annual Meeting of the Division of Fluid Dynamics, American Physical Society. In 1986 he was awarded a Higher Doctorate (D. Sc. (Eng.)) by the University of London for " published work of a high standing containing original contributions to the advancement of knowledge and learning in the fields of fluid mechanics, combustion and turbulence." In 1989 he was made an Overseas Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. Together with P.K. Yeung and S.S. Girimaji, in 1990 he won the First Prize in the IBM Supercomputing Competition (Engineering Division) for research on material surfaces in turbulence.
At Cornell and MIT Professor Pope has taught fluid mechanics, heat transfer, thermodynamics and combustion as well as advanced courses in turbulence and turbulent reactive flows. He has been a consultant to Boeing, Exxon, General Motors, MIT, Rolls-Royce and Fluent, and is a director of TQ Group Ltd. Other outside professional activities include being: Chair of the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics; Program Co-Chair of the Thirty-First International Symposium on Combustion (Heidelberg, 2006); an Editor of Combustion Theory and Modelling , Associate Editor of Physics of Fluids; being on the Editorial Advisory Board of Flow, Turbulence and Combustion, and serving on the several committees of professional societies.