Professor Varghese has an international reputation in the area of combustion diagnostics and non-equilibrium flows. He is a member of the National Technical Committee on Aerodynamic Measurement Technology of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and was awarded a Fulbright Grant in 1993 to apply laser diagnostics to hypersonic wind tunnels in France. He was awarded a Boeing-A. D. Welliver Faculty Fellowship in 1998. Dr. Varghese's research focuses on understanding the basic molecular processes occurring in high speed and high temperature flows. This is an inter-disciplinary field, requiring a synthesis of physics and chemistry with the more traditional engineering disciplines of fluid mechanics, heat transfer and thermodynamics. He applies his work to the study of combustion, rail-gun and thermal plasmas, and hypersonic flow. Dr. Varghese has established a laser diagnostics laboratory for experimental studies in combustion. His research publications have been extensively referenced, and a recent computer search of the Science Citation Index showed over 100 citations of his work by other authors publishing in archival journals such as "Applied Optics,"; "Nature,"; "Journal of Molecular Spectroscopy,"; "Journal of the Optical Society of America,"; "Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer," and "Physical Review." Since he joined The University of Texas at Austin in 1983, he has been principal investigator or co-principal investigator on externally funded research grants of over $2,500,000.