Richard Flay, Guest Professor at Central South University. He studied mechanical engineering at the University of Canterbury. He received a first class honours degree in BE (Mech) in 1975 and a Ph.D. in wind engineering in 1979. Subsequently, he served as a research fellow for the National Research Council for two years at the Atmospheric Environmental Service Center of the Environment Department of Toronto, Canada, where he collaborated with Dr. Hans Teunissen to conduct wind engineering research using the boundary layer wind tunnel. He then moved to a consulting firm in Toronto to work as an aerodynamic design engineer for four years and worked on design in many different types of wind tunnels, including subsonic and supersonic.

After returning to New Zealand, Professor Flay joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Auckland in 1984 as a Senior Lecturer. He has been a professor of mechanical engineering since 2000. He is the Director of the Sailing Research Center, Chairman of the Royal Naval Architects Association (New Zealand Division), and Chairman of the 9th Asia Pacific Wind Engineering Congress.

He has consulted and researched in the fields of wind engineering, sailing engineering, aerodynamics, and wind tunnel manufacturing. One of the highlights was the world's first wind tunnel that produced twisted flow to test yacht sails. This wind tunnel was used by the New Zealand sailing team and helped them win the 1995 America's Cup and successfully defended it in 2000. Most recently, he advised on wind tunnel design in England, Hong Kong, Australia, India and New Zealand.

In 2015, the wind energy engineering research team moved to the new campus in Newmarket, Auckland. Professor Flay designed a large boundary layer wind tunnel with a test section length of 20 meters, width 3.6 meters and height of 2.5 meters, which was completed in June 2015. Wind tunnels are used for teaching, research and commercial testing. The wind tunnel is equipped with a 512-channel electronic scanning pressure system, a JR3 high-frequency balance, and an Irwin probe to test the pedestrian wind environment. The wind tunnel is also used for cyclic aerodynamic resistance testing and vehicle testing with a moving ground plane below the model vehicle.