Yannis C. Yortsos

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Yannis C. Yortsos
Yortsos in 2024
Born1951 (age 73–74)
Athens, Greece
CitizenshipUnited States, Greece
Known forFluid flow, transport, and reaction in porous media
TitleDean, USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Awards
  • 2025 IFEES Duncan Fraser Global Award for Excellence in Engineering Education
  • NAE Gordon Prize 2022[1]
  • Emmy Award 2022 Documentary, "Lives Not Grades", Executive Producer
  • 2017 ASEE President's Award to Viterbi School for promotion of diversity in engineering to K-12 students as a career.[2]
  • 2017-2023, Member NAE Council[3]
  • 2014 Ellis Island Medal of Honor[4]
  • 2013-present Associate Member, Academy of Athens[5]
  • 2008-Present, Member of NAE Section 11[3]
  • 2005-present Zohrab A. Kaprielian Dean's Chair in Engineering[6]
  • 1995-present Chester Dolley Professor[7]
Academic background
EducationB.S. NTUA 1973
M.S. Caltech 1974
Ph.D. Caltech 1979
Alma materNational Technical University of Athens
California Institute of Technology
Thesis"Analytical Modeling of Oil Recovery by Steam Injection" (1978)
Academic work
DisciplineChemical Engineering
InstitutionsUSC Viterbi School of Engineering

Yannis C. Yortsos is a Greek-American chemical engineer and academic. He has served as Dean of the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California.[8] since 2005. He is the seventh and longest tenured dean in the school's history.

Early life

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Yannis Yortsos was born in 1951 in Athens, Greece. He attended the 1st Lyceum Venetokleion of Rhodes[9] and in 1968 he enrolled in the National Technical University of Athens, where he obtained his B.S. in Chemical Engineering, graduating first in his class in 1973.[10] He continued his studies at the California Institute of Technology, earning his M.S. in Chemical Engineering in 1974 and his Ph.D. in 1979, with his doctoral thesis, "Analytical Modeling of Oil Recovery by Steam Injection".[11]

In the fall of 1978, Yortsos joined the University of Southern California (USC) as assistant professor of Chemical Engineering and of Petroleum Engineering. He was promoted to associate professor in 1984 and to Professor in 1989. In 1981 he received the ARCO Oil and Gas, Outstanding Jr. Faculty Award and in 1985 the Rossiter W. Raymond Memorial Award of the AIME for Outstanding Technical Paper.[12] From 1991 to 1997, he served as department chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering. Between 2001 and 2005 he served as Associate Dean and Sr. Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. Throughout the period 1989- 2005 he also held visiting professor appointments at universities across Europe and North America, including Stanford, Clarkson University, Pierre et Marie Curie, Université Paris Sud, and at his graduate alma mater, the California Institute of Technology.

Dean of USC Viterbi School of Engineering

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In 2005 Yortsos was appointed interim dean of the USC Engineering School at the newly renamed USC Viterbi School of Engineering for the interim period of one year. In 2006, after an external search process, formally appointed as  Dean of Engineering.[13]

Yortsos was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering in 2008 and served on the NAE Council between 2017 and 2023. His election citation reads: "For fundamental advances in fluid flow, transport, and reactions in porous media applied to the recovery of subsurface resources." In 2025, he delivered the Plenary Lecture of the 2025 Annual Meeting of the NAE on “AI and Engineering Education”. He was also elected as Associate Member of the Academy of Athens in 2013 and as Foreign Member of the Indian National Academy of Engineering in 2024. Yortsos was awarded a 2014 Ellis Island Medal of Honor for his contributions as a first-generation American to engineering education and research.[14] He received the 2008 Western North America Reservoir Description and Dynamics Award of the Society of Petroleum Engineers, an Honorary Member Award from AIME in 2011, and was elected as AIChE Fellow in 2024.

As dean, Yortsos articulated the term "Engineering+", which encapsulates the nature of engineering to empower practically all disciplines in today's rapidly converging world and to help create a better world for all humanity.[15] In partnership with his colleagues, Tom Katsouleas, then Dean of the Duke Pratt School of Engineering and Rick Miller, then President of Olin College of Engineering, he co-founded in 2009 the Grand Challenges Scholars Program (GCSP),[16] designed to educate the engineering students who will address the Grand Challenges of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), articulated in 2008. In 2010 Dean Yortsos organized and hosted the Second Grand Challenges Summit at USC, which subsequently morphed into a series of bi-annual Grand Challenges Summits worldwide, organized by the National Academy of Engineering, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Chinese Academy of Engineering. For the creation of the GCSP, which today has expanded to almost one hundred engineering schools around the world, the NAE awarded to Yortsos and his colleagues the 2022 NAE Gordon Prize.[17]

Under Yortsos's tenure as dean, the Viterbi School faculty size has grown in size and demographics. Five academic departments were named during that period (the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science in 2005, the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2006, Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2007, the Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering in 2022, and the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science in 2023). He helped establish a number of joint programs with other schools within USC, including USC Games in 2006, a partnership with the USC School of Cinematic Arts, the Health Technology and Engineering in 2008, a partnership with the USC Keck School of Medicine, and the Center for AI in Society (CAIS) in 2016 in partnership with the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. In 2009 Dean Yortsos established the Department of Astronautical Engineering. In 2011 he helped establish the first Academic Center to host a Quantum Computer (D-Wave).[18] In 2013 he created the first Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship program in Engineering at USC.

In 2010 he led the creation of the iPodia program,  that allows students from multiple peer universities across the world to take a joint class together. Since its inception, the corresponding iPodia Alliance has grown to 17 engineering schools across the globe, enhancing the national composition of students, and providing access to education regardless of national borders or cultures.[19]

Yortsos was on the peer review team (1995-1996) of the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Disposal Peer Review Team of the Department of Energy. He  served on the National Research Council Committees for the 2017 report on a New Vision for Center-Based Engineering Research[20] as well as on the 2017 report on The Value of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences to National Priorities.[21] In 2020 he completed a three-year term as member of the NSF Engineering Advisory Committee.[22]

Between 2011 and 2017 he served on the executive committee of the Engineering Deans Council and on the Executive Committee of the Global Engineering Deans Council (2012-2016, 2021- 2023). Following the onset of the COVID-19 epidemic, he led the National Academy of Engineering Call to Action Against COVID, starting in April 2020.

From 2013 through 2022, Yortsos served as Principal Investigator of the National Science Foundation (NSF) I-Corps Innovation Node Los Angeles, a partnership between USC, Caltech and UCLA, one of nine in the nation. Starting in January 2022 he served as  the PI of the NSF’s I-Corps West Region Hub, a partnership with UCLA, the University of Colorado, and ten other affiliated universities (Caltech, Colorado School of Mines, UC Riverside, University of New Mexico, the University of Utah, UC Santa Barbara and Colorado State University), which is now one of the NSF's ten I-Corps Hubs.[23]

From 2012 to 2017 Yortsos served as Chair of the American Society for Engineering Education's (ASEE) Engineering Deans Council Diversity Committee. In this capacity, he led in 2015 a diversity initiative, highlighted at the White House in August 2015, that has been implemented by more than 250 engineering schools in the US.  in a formal ASEE initiative In 2017, the ASEE honored the Viterbi School under Dean Yortsos with its President's Award.[24] During that year, the ASEE also honored the Viterbi School and Dean Yortsos with an Award for Excellence in Veterans in Engineering

Throughout his tenure as dean, Yortsos has advocated a “change of conversation” about engineering, which is positioned as the enabling discipline of our times. As a result of this narrative, the demographic constituency of USC Viterbi students has expanded. Since 2019 the entering fall class in engineering has been gender-balanced. Between 2018 and 2021, Yortsos served  as the PI of the NSF Gender Equity Initiative EDGE.[25] For many of these and related contributions he was awarded the 2023 Chairman's Award from the Great Minds in STEM[26] and the 2024 Claire L. Felbinger Award of ABET.[27]

In advancing human-centric engineering solutions under Yortsos's Engineering+ narrative, USC Viterbi also offered some classes that address global challenges. A notable course offered through Civil Engineering included the journey of USC students to a refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesvos. . A resulting PBS documentary "Lives Not Grades" that documented this effort and journey won a Los Angeles-area Emmy in 2022[28] with Yortsos sharing the  Emmy as Executive Producer. In related initiatives, he established  the Engineering in Society Program (EIS), with an aim to provide to Viterbi engineering graduates not only with outstanding competence but also with outstanding character.

In the spring of 2024 Yortsos helped establish the new School of Advanced Computing at USC Viterbi. The creation of the new school within the USC Viterbi School of Engineering was made possible by the launch of an initiative on the Frontiers in Computing, enabled by a grant from the Lord Foundation of California, the largest educational gift in USC history.[29] The goals of the new entity are to advance digital competence and fluency across all engineering disciplines and to promote the solution of grand-challenge problems across various disciplines using advanced computing, including artificial intelligence and quantum information sciences, among many others.

In November 2022 Yortsos was appointed as Editor-in-Chief[30] of PNAS Nexus, founded in 2021. This gold open-access sibling of the PNAS Journal (and the only new journal of the National Academies in more than 100 years) aims to publish multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary papers across all realms in the sciences, engineering, social sciences, and medicine.

In 2025, in recognition of his work in the advancement of engineering education, Yortsos was awarded an Honorary Doctoral Degree by the National Technical University of Athens, Greece,[31] his undergraduate alma mater and the oldest engineering school in modern Greece, established in 1837. At the same year, Yortsos received the 2025 IFEES Duncan Fraser Global Award for Excellence in Engineering Education in recognition of his contributions to advancing engineering education worldwide.[32]

Research Fields

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Yortsos's research area is in fluid flow, transport and reaction processes in porous media with specific application to the subsurface.[33] Specific areas include viscous flows in porous media geometries, phase change in porous media, transport and displacement in heterogeneous and fractured media (including media with fractal geometry properties), filtration combustion, flow of fluids with yield stress in porous media and the drying of porous media. He has published more than 160 technical papers and supervised 28 PhD theses, all mostly before his appointment as dean. Motivated by the COVID epidemic he has also published on the spreading of epidemics by introducing analogies with chemical engineering processes.

Awards and distinctions

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  • 2025 Duncan Fraser Global Award for Excellence in Engineering Education[34]
  • 2025 Honorary Doctoral Degree and Distinguished Alumnus, National Technical University of Athens, Greece[35]
  • 2024 Foreign Fellow, Indian National Academy of Engineering [36]
  • 2024 Claire L. Felbinger Award for Diversity and Inclusion, ABET [37]
  • 2024 American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Fellow
  • 2015-2024 "LA500: The most influential people in Los Angeles", the Los Angeles Business Journal[38]
  • 2023 Chairman's Award, Great Minds in STEM[39]
  • 2022 NAE Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education[40]
  • 2022–present Editor-in-Chief, PNAS Nexus [41]
  • 2022 National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences: Los Angeles Area Emmy for Independent Programming, "Lives not Grades", Executive Producer[42]
  • 2022 Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)[43]
  • 2017 ASEE President's Award to Viterbi School for promotion of diversity in STEM careers to K-12 students.[44]
  • 2017–2024, Member NAE Council[45]
  • 2014 Ellis Island Medal of Honor[46]
  • 2013 Associate Member of the Academy of Athens[47]
  • 2008–Present, Member of the National Academy of Engineering (Sections 3 and 11)[48]
  • 2005 Zohrab A. Kaprielian Chair in Engineering[49]
  • 1995 Chester Dolley Professor of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, USC[43]

References

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  1. ^ "Recipients of the Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education". NAE Website.
  2. ^ Rizio, Rheagan. "USC Viterbi Recognized with the ASEE President's Award".
  3. ^ a b "Members Directory". NAE Website.
  4. ^ "EIHS Medalists". medalists.eihonors.org.
  5. ^ "Ακαδημία Αθηνών". www.academyofathens.gr.
  6. ^ "Endowed Chairs and Professorships".
  7. ^ "USC - Viterbi School of Engineering - Viterbi Faculty Directory". viterbi.usc.edu.
  8. ^ "USC - Viterbi School of Engineering. - Yannis Yortsos". Archived from the original on 26 November 2016. Retrieved 20 February 2013.
  9. ^ https://blicclic.wixsite.com/blic/copy-of-romanias[permanent dead link]
  10. ^ "A leading scientist in Chemical Engineering - ellines.com". ellines.com - Η πρώτη διαδικτυακή χώρα στον κόσμο. 2019-02-15. Retrieved 2024-02-26.
  11. ^ "Analytical modelling of oil recovery by steam injection" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2020-05-29.
  12. ^ "Yannis C. Yortsos | The American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers". aimehq.org. Retrieved 2024-02-26.
  13. ^ "History". USC Viterbi | School of Engineering. Retrieved 2024-02-26.
  14. ^ "Ellis Island Medal of Honor", Wikipedia, 2024-03-13, retrieved 2025-10-22
  15. ^ "Engineering +". USC Viterbi | School of Engineering. Retrieved 2024-02-26.
  16. ^ "The NAE Grand Challenge Scholars Program". NAE Website. Retrieved 2024-02-26.
  17. ^ "2022 Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education Awarded to GCSP Pioneers". NAE Website. Retrieved 2024-02-26.
  18. ^ "USC ISI works with D-Wave to house one of the first U.S-Based Advantage™ Quantum Computers". USC Viterbi | School of Engineering. Retrieved 2024-02-26.
  19. ^ "The USC Viterbi iPodia Program – Learning Together for a Better World". ipodia.usc.edu. Retrieved 2025-10-22.
  20. ^ Read "A New Vision for Center-Based Engineering Research" at NAP.edu. 2017. doi:10.17226/24767. ISBN 978-0-309-45905-1.
  21. ^ "The Value of SOCIAL, BEHAVIORAL, and ECONOMIC SCIENCES to National Priorities National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. The Value of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences to National Priorities: A Report for the National Science Foundation. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/24790". www.nationalacademies.org. 2017. Retrieved 2025-10-22. {{cite web}}: External link in |title= (help)
  22. ^ www.nsf.gov https://web.archive.org/web/20201019051818/https://www.nsf.gov/attachments/296024/public/2018_Fall_ENG_AdCom_Members-web.pdf. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2020-10-19. Retrieved 2025-10-22. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  23. ^ "View Hubs - NSF I-Corps™ | NSF - National Science Foundation". www.nsf.gov. Retrieved 2025-10-22.
  24. ^ "USC Viterbi Recognized with the ASEE President's Award". USC Viterbi | School of Engineering. Retrieved 2025-10-22.
  25. ^ "NSF Award Search: Award # 1760002". www.nsf.gov. Retrieved 2025-10-22.
  26. ^ greatmindsinstem.org https://web.archive.org/web/20230928221240/https://greatmindsinstem.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Winners-Press-Release-2023.pdf. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2023-09-28. Retrieved 2025-10-22. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  27. ^ "Claire L. Felbinger Award for Diversity and Inclusion". ABET. Retrieved 2025-10-22.
  28. ^ "Los Angeles Area Emmy Awards (2022)". IMDb. Retrieved 2025-10-22.
  29. ^ X; Bluesky; X (2019-11-13). "USC to receive $260-million gift, one of largest in higher education, underscoring its fundraising strength". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 2025-10-22.
  30. ^ "Yannis Yortsos Named Editor-In-Chief of PNAS Nexus". USC Viterbi | School of Engineering. Retrieved 2025-10-22.
  31. ^ "Αναγόρευση του Καθηγητή Γιάννη Γιώρτσου ως Επίτιμου Διδάκτορα της Σχολής Χημικών Μηχανικών του Εθνικού Μετσόβιου Πολυτεχνείου - Σχολή Χημικών Μηχανικών Ε.Μ.Π." Σχολή Χημικών Μηχανικών Ε.Μ.Π. Archived from the original on 2025-06-24. Retrieved 2025-10-22.
  32. ^ "Duncan Fraser Award – IFEES". Retrieved 2025-10-22.
  33. ^ Yortsos, Yannis (1994-01-01). "A study of vapor-liquid flow in porous media". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  34. ^ "Duncan Fraser Award – IFEES". Retrieved 2025-10-21.
  35. ^ Dimitris. "Invitation to Award Ceremony of the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from the School of Chemical Engineering to Professor Yannis Yortsos Dean of the Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California, USA" (in Greek). Archived from the original on 2025-07-17. Retrieved 2025-10-21.
  36. ^ "INAE Nomination Information, Nomination Information".
  37. ^ Taylor, Amanda (July 29, 2024). "ABET Announces 2024 Award Winners".
  38. ^ "LA500 2024: Yannis Yortsos". June 6, 2024.
  39. ^ Chairman’s Award from the Great Minds in STEM
  40. ^ "Recipients of the Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education". NAE Website. Retrieved 2024-03-26.
  41. ^ "Editorial Board". Oxford Academic.
  42. ^ "Winners of the 2022 Los Angeles area Emmy Awards announced" (PDF). www.emmys.com.
  43. ^ a b "USC - Viterbi School of Engineering - Viterbi Faculty Directory". viterbi.usc.edu. Retrieved 2024-03-26.
  44. ^ "USC Viterbi Recognized with the ASEE President's Award". USC Viterbi | School of Engineering. Retrieved 2024-03-26.
  45. ^ "Members Directory". NAE Website. Retrieved 2024-03-26.
  46. ^ "EIHS Medalists". medalists.eihonors.org. Retrieved 2024-03-26.
  47. ^ "Members of the First Section". Academy of Athens. 2015-11-23. Retrieved 2024-03-26.
  48. ^ "Yannis Yortsos". NAE Website. Retrieved 2024-03-26.
  49. ^ "Endowed Chairs and Professorships". USC Viterbi | School of Engineering. Retrieved 2024-03-26.
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