Creative Turbulence

Katepalli Sreenivasan holds professorships in the Department of Physics as well as the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, and is the Eugene Kleiner Professor for Innovation in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at NYU. He is also University Professor in NYU, a title conferred upon scholars whose work is interdisciplinary and reflects exceptional breadth. Sreenivasan arrived at NYU after tenures at Yale, where he spent more than 20 years and held multiple endowed professorships and chairmanships; the University of Maryland, where he led the Institute for Physical Science and Technology; and the International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, where he served as director and held (and continues to hold) the Abdus Salam Professorship. He has also been a visiting professor at Caltech, Cambridge University, Rockefeller University, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, among other institutions.

Sreenivasan’s research interests include fluid mechanics and turbulence, nonlinear and nonequilibrium phenomena, cryogenic helium and stellar physics.
He has been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, U.S. National Academy of Engineering, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Indian Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy, Indian National Academy of Engineering, Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS), Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, and African Academy of Sciences, among other such groups, and his many honors include the Guggenheim Fellowship, Otto Laporte Memorial Award and Dwight Nicholson Medal of the American Physical Society, UNESCO Medal for Promoting International Scientific Cooperation and World Peace from the World Heritage Centre, and the Award for Scientific Cooperation of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, etc.