Katepalli Sreenivasan - Biography#

At New York University (NYU), Sreeni was appointed the Executive vice Provost for Science and Technology and the President of the former Brooklyn Polytechnic. He oversaw the complex process of merger of the two institutions, became the dean of engineering at NYU, and led initial efforts in creating the Research Institute at NYU’s Abu Dhabi campus.

Sreeni served as director of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, for seven years earlier, where he also held the Abdus Salam Professorship. There, he immersed himself in the Center’s mission, winning support of many governments across the world to establish research centers in their countries, and mentored literally hundreds of young researchers.

Prior to that, Sreeni taught at the University of Maryland for about a year and a half. He was the Distinguished University Professor, Glenn L. Martin Professor of Engineering and Professor of Physics, and was the Director of the Institute for Physical Science and Technology.

Prior to UMD, he taught at Yale for some 21 years, since 1979, in Engineering and Applied Science, with joint appointments in the Departments of Mathematics, Physics, and Applied Physics. He was the Harold W. Cheel Professor and the Andrew Mellon Professor. He was the chair of the mechanical engineering department for 6 years and the acting dean, for one year, of the faculty of engineering.

Sreeni was a postdoc and lecturer at Johns Hopkins and University of Sydney, prior to which he graduated with the PS Narayana Gold Medal for the best thesis in Mechanical Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science.

Sreeni graduated with first rank for all the universities in the State of Karnataka in Mechanical Engineering.

Sreeni has been a visiting professor at Caltech, Rockefeller University, Cambridge University (UK), Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (twice), Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Scientific Research, and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Indian Institute of Science, among others. He is an Inaugural Fellow of the Texas Institute for Advanced Studies; the Rothschild Distinguished Professor at the Newton Institute at Cambridge (three times), etc.