Professor Katepalli Sreenivasan (Sreeni) is a professor at New York University, where he is the University Professor and Eugene Kleiner Chair for Innovation, Professor in the Physics Department, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, and Tandon School of Engineering, and directs the Center for Space Science at the NYU Abu Dhabi campus. He is a fluid dynamicist with a broad range of interests, and expertise spanning experiment, theory and simulations. He has an enormous range of experience in scientific leadership and has served the scientific community, especially the APS, in various capacities.
Until a few years ago, Sreeni served as Dean of Engineering at New York University (NYU)—for campuses in Brooklyn, NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai—and as the President of the once-famous Brooklyn Polytechnic before its merger with NYU, and as President of the former Polytechnic, Sreeni oversaw the complex process of its merger with New York University. This effort involved matters of curricula, faculty, legal permissions, adequate communication among constituents, and general administration, etc. The merger has already yielded several successful outcomes, especially in connecting engineering with medicine and health, as well as business and law, besides sciences and mathematics, and many people regard the new engineering school as the most exciting part of the University now: He has raised private money, reorganized departments, helped establish some world-class research centers, and enhanced the presence of the school in the emerging landscape of entrepreneurship in New York City. He raised the quality of students and increased their diversity, with a focus particularly on first-generation students.
Prior to coming to NYU in late 2009, Sreeni served as the director and Abdus Salam Professor of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy, for seven years. During his tenure, he rejuvenated many drying scientific and policy connections and added new constituencies (with corresponding increases in funding). During his tenure, typically some 6000 scientists used to visit ICTP annually; he doubled the participation of women scientists. He continued to build areas of high energy physics, condensed matter physics and mathematics which were traditional to ICTP, but built a new section on earth system physics, in recognition of the enormous importance of treating our habitat as a complex and interacting system. He was instrumental in establishing small but excellent scientific centers in several countries (such as Romania, Pakistan, and Morocco), with new support generated for them from the local governments. As a means to that end, he worked with Presidents, Prime Ministers, Ministers and Ambassadors in several countries, in addition to being close to working scientists.
Earlier, Sreeni taught at the University of Maryland for about a year and a half, as Distinguished University Professor, Glenn L. Martin Professor of Engineering and Professor of Physics, and as the Director of the Institute for Physical Science and Technology (IPST). The university allowed him to keep his professorship while in Trieste, enabling to maintain a research group there. Even in that short time of his stay at Maryland, he built up several valuable connections between IPST, on the one hand, and the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Institute of Health (NIH), on the other. The primary reason he moved to Maryland (from Yale) is to understand how public universities works: being more representative of the general population than private universities.
At Yale university Sreeni taught since 1979 as a faculty member in engineering and applied science, where he was the Harold W. Cheel Professor of Mechanical Engineering (1988-2002), the chair of the mechanical engineering department (1987-1992) and the acting chairman of the council of engineering (1989). He also held joint appointments in the departments of physics, applied physics, and mathematics; he was also on the administrative group of the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics and a member of the Center for Systems Biology. He has been a visiting professor at Caltech, Rockefeller U, Cambridge U, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (twice), Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Scientific Research, and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, among others. He is an Inaugural Fellow of the Texas A&M’s Hagler Institute for Advanced Studies.
Sreeni was a post-doc at Johns Hopkins U for about two years, working with Stanley Corrsin and Les Kovasznay; he was also a lecturer there for part of that stay. Prior to that, he was a research fellow at Sydney U and Newcastle U, Australia, working with Professor Robert Antonia. His Ph.D. work was done under the supervision of Professor Roddam Narasimha at the Indian Institute of Science.
Sreeni has served his larger community in multiple ways. Within the US National Academies, he has served on the NAE Committee on Membership and the Mechanical Engineering Section (chair, vice chair, member) and the Mechanical Engineering Peer Committee (chair, vice chair, member); the NAS Chair of Section 31, member of the Class III Membership Committee; International Temporary Nominating Committee for Class III of NAS; the Committee on Human Rights of the NAS, NAE, and IOM (now NAM); the NRC Committee on Condensed-Matter and Materials Physics; the NRC committee on Nonlinear Dynamics and Fractals; on the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Editorial Board, editor-in-chief of Springer’s Journal of Nonlinear Science. He serves as a member of the Round Table on Space Technology consisting of Industry, government and University (STIGUR), and recently on the National Academies’ Board on Mathematical Sciences and Their Applications. He has served in many other editorial capacities (Journal of Fluid Mechanics, Phys. Fluids, American Scientist, etc).
In recognition of the quality of his scientific work, Sreeni has been honored in various ways. Among them are Humboldt Fellowship; Guggenheim Fellowship; Otto Laporte Memorial Award of American Physical Society; TWAS Medal Lecture in Engineering Science; Distinguished Alumnus Award and Centennial Professorship of the Indian Institute of Science; Sir C.V. Raman Visiting Professorship of the Indian Academy of Sciences; the International Prize and Gold Medal in memory of Professors Modesto Panetti and Carlo Ferrari, Academia delle Scienze di Torino, Italy; National Order of Scientific Merit (the highest scientific honor) by the Brazilian Government and the Academy of Sciences; UNESCO Medal for Promoting International Scientific Cooperation and World Peace from the World Heritage Centre, Florence, Italy; President Dr. Zakir Husain Memorial Award from the Duty Society and the Indian Society of Applied and Industrial Mathematics; the Melvin Jones Fellow of the Lions Club (for humanitarian service); the Dwight Nicholson Medal of the American Physical Society for human outreach; the 2009 Nusselt-Reynolds Prize from the Assembly of World Conference on Experimental Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics; the 2009 award for International Scientific Cooperation given by the American Association for the Advancement of Science; the 2011 Multicultural Leadership Award of the National Diversity Council; the Corporate Social Responsibility Award from City and State Magazine, New York, 2016. He was recently listed to be among the 15 most influential people in Brooklyn. In the last three or years, he has received the 2020 G.I. Taylor Medal of the Society for Engineering Sciences, the 2020, von Karman Medal of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the 2020 Charles Russ Richards Memorial Award of the American Society of Mechanical Engineering and Pi Tau Sigma (National Mechanical Engineering Honor Society), the 2020 Fluid Dynamics Prize of the American Physical Society, the 2021, Amity Global Excellence Award, the 2022 Leo P. Kadanoff Prize of the American Physical Society, and the 2022 ASME Medal, the highest award that the Society bestows to recognize eminently distinguished engineering achievement. He is the 2022 J.C. Bose Lecturer of the Indian National Academy of Sciences.
Sreeni is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences; US National Academy of Engineering; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the Accademia die Lincei, Rome; Honorary Membership, Accademia Torre e Tasso, Duino-Aurisina, Trieste, Italy; Indian Academy of Sciences: Indian National Science Academy; Indian National Engineering Academy; the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS); and the African Academy of Sciences.