Yannis C. Yortsos

Yannis C. Yortsos is a Greek-American chemical engineer and academic, currently serving as Dean of the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California.

Early life
Yannis Yortsos was born in 1951 in Athens, Greece. He attended the 1st Lyceum Venetokleion of Rhodes 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. 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".

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 1985 he received the Rossiter W. Raymond Memorial Award of the AIME for Outstanding Technical Paper. 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 alma mater, CalTech.

Dean of USC Viterbi School of Engineering
In 2005, Yortsos was appointed interim dean of the USC Engineering School, by then renamed (in 2004) as the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. In 2006 he was made Dean of Engineering.

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. 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), 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.

Under Yortos's tenure as dean, the Viterbi School faculty size has grown in size and demographics. Five new academic departments were named in that period (Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science in 2005, Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2006, Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2007, Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering in 2022, and the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science in 2023). He also helped establish a number of joint programs with other schools within USC, including USC Games in 2006, a partnership with USC School of Cinematic Arts, 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 helped establish the Department of Astronautical Engineering. In 2011 he established the first Academic Center to host a Quantum Computer (D-Wave) and in 2013 the Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship program in Engineering.

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. From 2022 he has been the PI of the NSI I-Corps Hub: West Region, one of five such Hubs in the U.S., a partnership with UCLA, the University of Colorado, and seven other affiliated universities (Caltech, Colorado School of Mines, UC Riverside, University of New Mexico, and the University of Utah).

In 2010 he led the creation of the iPodia program, directed by Professor Stephen Lu. This program allows students from multiple peer universities across the world to take a joint class. Since its inception, the corresponding iPodia Alliance has grown to 17 universities across the globe, enhancing diversity of students and access to education regardless of national borders or cultures.

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 today has resulted in a diversity pledge signed by more than 250 engineering schools in the U.S. In 2017, in recognition of this effort, the ASEE honored the Viterbi School under Dean Yortsos with its President's Award. Yortsos was also awarded the 2014 Ellis Island Medal of Honor for his contributions as a first-generation American to engineering education and research. Throughout his tenure as dean, Yortsos has advocated a change of conversation about engineering. As a result of this narrative, USC Viterbi attracts a large number of previously under-represented demographic groups in engineering and since 2019 each entering fall class has been gender-balanced. Between 2018 and 2021, he was the PI of the NSF Gender Equity Initiative EDGE. As a result of these efforts and in additional recognition of his efforts to expand engineering to heretofore minority communities in engineering, he was awarded the 2023 Chairman's Award from the Great Minds in STEM.

In advancing human-centric engineering solutions under Yortsos's Engineering+ principle, USC Viterbi offered a number of classes in addressing global humanitarian challenges. A specific class offered through the Civil Engineering program, also included the journey of USC students to refugee camps on the Greek island of Lesvos to apply real-world solutions to help thousands of refugees from the wars in the Middle East. The resulting PBS documentary "Lives Not Grades" that documented this effort and journey won a Los Angeles-area Emmy in 2022. with Yortsos sharing this Emmy as Executive Producer. A related initiative he helped establish is the Engineering in Society Program (EIS), which aims to produce trustworthiness in engineering and technology, by educating Viterbi engineers not only with outstanding competence but also with outstanding character.

Yortsos was on the peer review team for the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Disposal and 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. In 2020 he completed a three-year term as member of the NSF Engineering Advisory Committee.

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) Since April 2020, following the onset of the COVID-19 epidemic, he led the National Academy of Engineering Call to Action Against COVID.

In the spring of 2023 USC announced the creation of a new School of Advanced Computing at USC Viterbi. This school will be one of three components of the initiative Frontiers in Computing, enabled by a 2019 grant of $260 million from the Lord Foundation of California, the largest educational gift in USC history. The goals of this 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 other advanced computing methods.

In alignment with the interdisciplinary academic paradigm, since November 2022 Yortsos has served as Editor-in-Chief of PNAS Nexus, founded in 2021, as the only new scientific journal of the National Academies in more than 100 years. This gold open-access journal, sibling of PNAS Journal, aims to publish multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary papers across all realms in the sciences, engineering, social sciences, and medicine.

Research projects
Yortsos's specific research area have been in fluid flow, transport and reaction processes in porous media with specific application to the subsurface. 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 drying of porous media.

Awards and distinctions

 * 2023 Chairman's Award, Great Minds in STEM
 * 2022 NAE Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education
 * 2022 National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences: Los Angeles Area Emmy for Independent Programming, "Lives not Grades", Executive Producer
 * 2022 Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
 * 2017 ASEE President's Award to Viterbi School for promotion of diversity in STEM careers to K-12 students.
 * 2017–2023, Member NAE Council
 * 2014 Ellis Island Medal of Honor
 * 2013 Associate Member of the Academy of Athens
 * 2008–Present, Member of the National Academy of Engineering (Sections 3 and 11)
 * 2005 Zohrab A. Kaprielian Chair in Engineering
 * 1995 Chester Dolley Professor of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, USC