From 1947 to 1978 Kovasznay was a faculty member of the Aeronautics Department[1] organized by Francis H. Clauser (1913–2013)[2] at Johns Hopkins University (JHU).
In December he resigned from JHU to become a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Houston, where he remained in his professorship until his sudden death in 1980.
He was also one of the first to apply the statistical "information theory" of Claude Shannon to photographic measurements, treating the film graininess as the noise.
[5] Kovasznay's theoretical fluid dynamic contributions to turbulence began with the simplest plausible turbulence spectrum, and included categorization of gas dynamic fluctuations into vorticity, sound, and entropy "modes", and the analysis of the lowest order nonlinear interactions (with B. T. Chu).
After work on laminar instability (with W. O. Criminale) and magneto-fluid dynamic fluctuations (with M. M. Stanisic), he introduced a practical turbulent shear equation closure model with (V. Nee).