K.R. Sreenivasan

Katepalli R. Sreenivasan is a physicist, engineer, and leader in international scholarship.

Born in 1947, he earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Bangalore University and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, where he was awarded a doctorate in aerospace engineering in 1975 working with Prof. Roddam 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 joined the faculty at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut in 1979, where he was the Harold W. Cheel professor of mechanical engineering and professor of physics, applied physics and mathematics. There he served, for a long time, as chairman of Mechanical Engineering.

At Yale, he had a close collaboration with Benoit Mandelbrot in developing theories of fractals and multifractals and their applications to turbulence. His crowning achievement was the development of multifractal theories, published in the landmark 1990 article "Joint multifractal measures: theory and applications to turbulence" (co-authored with C. Meneveau, P. Kailasnath and M. S. Fan) [Meneveau, C., K.R. Sreenivasan, P. Kailasnath and M. S. Fan. "Joint multifractal measures: theory and applications to turbulence". Phys Rev A 41 (1990):894] .

In January 2002, after 22 years of service at Yale, he took the position at the University of Maryland, College park as Director of the Institute for Physical Sciences and Technology. He was appointed Director of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy in March 2003. There he holds the title of Abdus Salam Honorary Professor. The ICTP Director has the rank of Assistant Director General in the UNESCO.

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". At the American Physical Society (APS), he served as the Chair of the Division of Fluid Dynamics, and the founding Chairman of the Topical Group in Statistical and Nonlinear Physics.

He is the Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and 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 Fellowship. He is also the fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He received the Distinguished Scholar Award from 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 include fluid dynamics, turbulence, complex fluids, cryogenic helium and nonlinear dynamics.

Notes and References

1. Meneveau, C., K.R. Sreenivasan, P. Kailasnath and M. S. Fan. "Joint multifractal measures: theory and applications to turbulence". Phys Rev A 41 (1990):894

References