Portonovo Ayyaswamy, 2018 ASME Honorary Member

Portonovo Ayyaswamy, Ph.D., the Asa Whitney professor of dynamical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, is honored for exceptional contributions to mechanical engineering through a career marked with seminal and groundbreaking research scholarship, which has engendered transformational technology transfer for diverse applications; and for exemplary professional service to the worldwide scientific and practicing thermal engineering community.

Dr. Ayyaswamy has been a member of the faculty at UPenn since 1974. He is world renowned for contributions to diverse areas of multiscale and multiphase flow, heat and mass transfer. His seminal contributions to transport with moving droplets/bubbles have had an extraordinary impact on both fundamental understanding and the development of novel devices. Other contribution areas include biofluid mechanics, heat and mass transfer; ionized arc plasma heat transfer; capillary flows; buoyancy flows in tilted cavities; the thermal design of nuclear reactors; and targeted drug delivery using nanocarriers.

He has published more than 200 archival papers and technical reports, and given numerous keynote and invited lectures. Dr. Ayyaswamy holds two patents.

An ASME Fellow, Dr. Ayyaswamy has been serving as editor of the Journal of Heat Transfer since 2016. He received the Society’s Heat Transfer Memorial Award–Science in 2001 and Worcester Reed Warner Medal in 2007. In 2014 he was the recipient of the Max Jakob Memorial Award from ASME and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

Dr. Ayyaswamy is a member of the American Nuclear Society, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the American Society for Gravitational and Space Research.

Among his honors, two sessions at the 7th World Congress of Biomechanics, held in Boston in 2014, were designated as P. Ayyaswamy birthday tributes.

Dr. Ayyaswamy earned master’s degrees in science and engineering from Columbia University in New York in 1965 and 1967, respectively. In 1971 he earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Video profile produced and written by Roger Torda and edited by Juan Yepes.

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