UCLA Samueli School of Engineering Dean Jayathi Murthy has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, among the highest professional honors granted to an American engineer. The academy announced today its 2020 class of 87 members and 18 international members.
Murthy was elected “for the development of unstructured solution-adaptive finite volume methods for heat, mass and momentum transport.” She is the Ronald and Valerie Sugar Dean of UCLA Engineering and a distinguished professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. Her research interests include nanoscale heat transfer, computational fluid dynamics, and simulations of fluid flow and heat transfer for industrial applications. Recently, Murthy’s focus is on sub-micron thermal transport, multiscale multi-physics simulations of micro- and nano-electromechanical systems, and the uncertainty quantifications involved in those systems.
Murthy joined UCLA Engineering as its seventh dean in January 2016. She is the first woman to hold the position, leading a school of 190 faculty members, and more than 6,000 undergraduate and graduate students.
Prior to UCLA, Murthy was chair of the department of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, and held the Ernest Cockrell Jr. Memorial Chair in Engineering. From 2008 to 2014, Murthy served as the director of the Center for Prediction of Reliability, Integrity and Survivability of Microsystems, a $21 million center of excellence supported by the National Nuclear Security Administration.
Before joining the University of Texas at Austin, Murthy was the Robert V. Adams Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University from 2008 to 2011. Prior to Purdue, she was a professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and was an assistant professor at Arizona State University where she began her career.
From 1988 to 1998, Murthy worked at New Hampshire-based Fluent, Inc., a developer and vendor of the world’s most widely used computational fluid dynamics software. She led the development of algorithms and software that still form the core the company’s products.
Murthy received a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Minnesota, a master’s degree from Washington State University, and her undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, where she was named a distinguished alumna in 2012. She is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, known as ASME, and the recipient of many honors, including the ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award in 2016 and the ASME Electronics and Photonics Packaging Division Clock Award. Murthy is the author of more than 300 technical publications, an editor of the second edition of the Handbook of Numerical Heat Transfer, and serves on the editorial boards of Numerical Heat Transfer and the International Journal of Thermal Sciences.
Founded in 1964, the National Academy of Engineering is a private, independent, nonprofit institution. It is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, with more than 2,000 peer-elected members and international members, senior professionals in business, academia and government who are among the world’s most accomplished engineers.
