Sotiropoulos to lead St. Anthony Falls Laboratory

Fotis Sotiropoulos, currently on the faculty at Georgia Institute of Technology, will join the Institute of Technology as director of the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory (SAFL) and professor of civil engineering in January 2006. Sotiropoulos currently is an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Georgia Tech, where he holds a joint appointment in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the G.W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.

Sotiropoulos received a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 1986, a master of science in aerospace engineering from The Pennsylvania State University in 1989, and a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the University of Cincinnati in 1991.

His research interests span a broad range of topics in computational fluid dynamics, cardiovascular fluid mechanics, hydraulics, renewable energy systems, environmental fluid mechanics, nonlinear dynamics, and chaos.

Sotiropoulos is an associate editor for the ASCE Journal of Hydraulic Engineering. He has authored and co-authored 80 journal papers, book chapters, and conference proceedings. He has received a NSF Faculty Early Career Development Award and has been invited by the National Academy of Engineering to participate in the 8th Annual Symposium on Frontiers of Engineering (2002) and the 2005 German-American Symposium on Frontiers of Engineering.

SAFL is a teaching and research facility of the Department of Civil Engineering and the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Minnesota. SAFL advances the knowledge and understanding of environmental hydraulics, turbulence, earthscape evolution, and climate/ ecosystem dynamics through high-quality experimental, theoretical, and computational research.