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Speaker
Yannis C. Yortsos
is the Dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the Zohrab
Kaprielian Chair in Engineering, a position he holds since 2005.
Prior to that he served from 2001 to 2005 as Associate Dean and then
as Sr. Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. Yortsos served as chair
of the Department of Chemical Engineering and in 1995 he was
appointed to the Chester Dolley Professorship. He received a BS
(Diploma) degree in Chemical Engineering from the National Technical
University of Athens, Greece, and MS and PhD degrees from the
California Institute of Technology, all in chemical engineering. His
research area is in fluid flow, transport and reaction processes in
porous media with specific application to the subsurface. He was
elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2008, where he has
also served as secretary, vice-chair and chair of Section 11. Since
July 2017, Yortsos serves as a member of the NAE Council. In 2011 he
was awarded the distinction of honorary member of the AIME, in 2013
he was elected as Associate member of the Academy of Athens, in 2014
he received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor and since 2017 he holds
an honorary degree from Tsinghua University.
He served on the
NRC Committees for the 2017 report on a New Vision for Center-Based
Engineering Research as well as the 2017 report on The Value
of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences to National Priorities.
He currently serves as a member of the NSF Engineering Advisory
Committee. As dean of engineering, he articulated in 2008 the concept
of Engineering+, positioning engineering as the enabling discipline
of our times, and has been actively engaged in the effort to “change
the conversation about engineering”.
Along with
colleagues at Duke University and Olin College, he co-founded in 2009
the Global Grand Challenges Scholars Program. He organized and hosted
at USC in Fall 2010 the NAE Second Grand Challenges Summit, which
spurred in 2013 the Global Grand Challenges Summits. These are
bi-annual meetings of the NAE, the Royal Academy of Engineering and
the Chinese Academy of Engineering, on the organizing committees of
which he has continuously served. Between 2012 and 2017, Yortsos was
the chair of the Diversity Committee of the Engineering Deans
Council, in which capacity he has spearheaded an engineering
diversity initiative, now adopted by more than 210 engineering deans
nationwide.
In recognition of
these initiatives, the USC Viterbi School of Engineering received in
2017 the ASEE President’s Award. Yortsos is the PI of the NSF I-Corps
Innovation Node Los Angeles, established in 2014 as a partnership
between USC, Caltech and UCLA. Between 2011 and 2017 he served on the
Executive Committee of the Engineering Deans Council (2011-2017) and
on the Executive Committee of the Global Engineering Deans Council
(2012-2016).
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