K.R. Sreenivasan

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Katepalli R. Sreenivasan is a Physicist, Engineer, and leader in international scholarship.

He earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees in India, at Bangalore University and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, where he was awarded a doctorate in aerospace engineering in 1975 working with Prof. Narasimha. Following two years of post-doctoral study in Sydney and Newcastle, Australia, he traveled to the United States to serve as a researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and then at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, where he was the Harold W. Cheel professor of mechanical engineering and professor of physics, applied physics and mathematics. There he served, for a time, as chair of Mechanical Engineering.

He then moved to the University of Maryland as Director of the Institute for Physical Sciences and Technology; soon after he was appointed Director of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy. There he was given the title of Abdus Salam Honorary Professor.

Sreenivasan has held visiting positions at the Indian Institute of Science, Caltech, Rockefeller University, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, and, as the Sir C.V. Raman Professor, at the Indian Academy of Sciences.

He served as editor or associate editor of the journals Theoretical and Computational Fluid Mechanics, Physical Review Letters, Physical Review E, Journal of Applied Mechanics, Physics of Fluids, and the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. He was the Chairman of the Mechanical Engineering Department and Acting Chairman of the Council of Engineering at Yale. At the American Physical Society (APS), he served as the Chair of the Division of Fluid Dynamics, as the founding Chairman of the Topical Group in Statistical and Nonlinear Physics, and as a member of the Publications Oversight Committee.

He is Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Third World Academy of Sciences, member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Science, Honorary Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and a recipient of Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Science. He received the Humboldt and Guggenheim Fellowships, Fellowship in the APS, ASME and AAAS, Distinguished Scholar Award of the American Chapter of the Indian Physics Association, the Otto Laporte Memorial Award of APS, and the 2002 Medal in Engineering Sciences from the Third World Academy of Sciences.

Sreenivasan's career interests included fluid dynamics, turbulence, singularities, complex fluids, combustion, cryogenic helium and nonlinear dynamics.