Yannis C Yortsos

Biography

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Yannis C. Yortsos is the Chester Dolley Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, a position he holds since 1995. Between 2005 and 2026, he served as Dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. He held the position of Associate Dean and then Sr. Associate Dean for Academic Affairs between 2001 and 2005, and as Department Chair of Chemical Engineering between 1991 and 1996. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (elected in 2008), an Associate member of the Academy of Athens (elected in 2013) and a Foreign Member of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (elected in 2005). Since 2022 he serves is the Editor-in-Chief of PNAS Nexus, the interdisciplinary journal of the National Academies (NAS, NAE and NAM). He is also an elected Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (2024), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2022), and an Honorary Member of AIME and of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (2011). In 2025, he was awarded the IFEES Duncan Fraser Global Award for Excellence in Engineering Education.

Yortsos joined the USC faculty of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering in 1978.

He received a BS (Diploma) degree in Chemical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and MS and PhD degrees from the California Institute of Technology, all in chemical engineering. His research area is in fluid flow, transport and reaction processes in porous media with specific application to the subsurface. More recently, and prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, he has published on the spreading of epidemics.

As dean of engineering, he articulated the concept of Engineering+, positioning engineering as the enabling discipline of our times, and has been actively engaged in the effort to “change the conversation about engineering”. He organized and hosted at USC in Fall 2010 the NAE Second Grand Challenges Summit, which spurred in 2013 and until 2021 the series of Global Grand Challenges Summits, which were bi-annual meetings of the NAE, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, on the organizing committees of which he continuously served.

Between 2012 and 2017, Yortsos was the chair of the Diversity Committee of the Engineering Deans Council, in which capacity he has spearheaded an engineering diversity initiative, now adopted by more than 250 engineering schools nationwide. In recognition of these initiatives, the USC Viterbi School of Engineering received in 2017 the ASEE President’s Award, and at the same time was one of the four engineering schools nationwide that received the ASEE Award for Excellence in Veterans in Engineering. For his leadership in this area, he received the 2023 GMiS Chairman’s Award, Great Minds in STEM and the Claire L. Felbinger Award for Diversity and Inclusion of ABET in 2024.

Yortsos was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2008, where he has also served as secretary, vice-chair and chair of Section 11, and since July 2017 as a member of the NAE Council. He 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 and completed a three-year term as member of the NSF Engineering Advisory Committee. He served on the Executive Committee of the Engineering Deans Council of the ASEE (2011-2017) and on the Executive Committee of the Global Engineering Deans Council of IFEES (2011-1015 and 2021-2024).

Yortsos received in 2014 the Ellis Medal of Honor and in 2017 an honorary degree from Tsinghua University. In 2022, he received along with three of his colleagues, the Gordon Prize of the National Academy of Engineering, for the creation in 2009 of the Grand Challenges Scholars Program, now adopted by many universities in the US and overseas. At the same year (2022), he won, along with several of his USC colleagues, a Los Angeles area Emmy for his role in supporting the creation of the documentary Lives not Grades, that chronicled a USC engineering class on Engineering Innovation for Global Crises. He received in 1985 the Rossiter W. Raymond Memorial Award of AIME and in 1981 the ARCO Oil and Gas, Outstanding Jr. Faculty Award.

Yortsos has been the PI of many research awards including the NSF I-Corps Innovation Node Los Angeles (2014-2021), established as a partnership between USC, Caltech and UCLA, and the NSF Gender Equity Initiative EDGE in partnership woth ASEE (2018-2021). Following the onset of the COVID-19 epidemic he led, since April 2020, the National Academy of Engineering Call to Action Against COVID. He was the PI of the NSF I-Corps Innovation Hub: West, a five-year partnership (2022-2026) between USC, the University of Colorado, UCLA, Caltech, Colorado School of Mines, the University of New Mexico, UC Riverside, and the University of Utah.