Yannis Yortsos, a member of the Academy of Athens and of the National Academy of Engineering of America, is one of the world’s most famous researchers in Chemical Engineering. He is the author of more than 145 refereed publications, he has given more than 175 invited talks and he has presented more than 160 conference papers.

He was born in Rhodes in 1950, graduated from the Venetian Lyceum and in 1968 he was admitted to the Department of Chemical Engineering of NTUA. Throughout his studies he had a scholar from the State Scholarship Foundation and in 1973 he graduated first from the Department of Chemical Engineering.

He earned M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the California Institute of Technology, in 1974 and 1979, respectively, all in chemical engineering. He joined USC in 1979 as an assistant professor in petroleum and chemical engineering and was promoted to the ranks of associate professor and full professor in 1984 and 1990, respectively.

Yortsos was a member of the Peer Review Committee on Thermal Hydrology in 1995, a member of the Panel on Expert Elicitation on the Near-Field/Altered Zone Environment in 1997-1998, and an advisor to the TSPA-VA Peer Review Committee in 1998-1999.

Yannis Yortsos was appointed dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering in 2005. He is the Chester F. Dolley Professor of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering and also holds the Zohrab A. Kaprielian Dean’s Chair in Engineering.

Under Dean Yortsos’ leadership, the Viterbi School has risen to 10th worldwide for engineering, computer science and technology (2010 Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings).

He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering since 2008 and serves as the liaison of Section 11 to the National Research Council. Since 2013 he is a member of the Academy of Athens

He also 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 a member of the NSF Engineering Advisory Committee.

Included in his publications are studies of steam injection, heat transfer, in-situ combustion and thermal recovery processes in porous media; the development of analytical solutions to mathematical models of transport in porous media; viscous flow instabilities in porous media and Hele-Shaw cells; viscous flows in constricted geometries; the evolution of gas in phase change in porous media, as in boiling and related geothermal problems; the modeling of mass transfer in porous media with application to soil remediation; and the application of optimization methods in subsurface flows.

He has supervised 27 Ph.D. theses and 8 post-doctoral researchers and was the external examiner in seven Ph.D. theses.