Professor Andrea Prosperetti has seen a lot happen in his 31 years at Johns Hopkins University, and the Department of Mechanical Engineering faculty and staff are pleased to have joined him in this part of his journey. But as they say, all good things must come to an end. Dr. Prosperetti is retiring from JHU and moving to the University of Houston, where he will continue his work in the field of fluid dynamics and scientific computation. While he will no longer be on campus, he will continue to be affiliated with the Department through his appointment as Homewood Professor of Engineering beginning July 1, 2016. Before we send him off, we’d like to look back and applaud him on all that he has accomplished during his time here at Johns Hopkins.
Prosperetti joined the Mechanical Engineering Department in 1985 and served as Chair from 1988-1991. In 1994, he was appointed the Charles A. Miller Jr. Professor of Mechanical Engineering and in 1998 added a part-time position as the Gerrit Berkhoff Professor of Applied Physics at the University of Twente in the Netherlands to his resume.
Throughout these years, Prosperetti has led research in the field of multiphase flow and bubbles. His landmark contributions earned him the title of Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Acoustical Society of America and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Japanese Society of Multiphase Flow (2001), The Otto Laporte Award from the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics (2002), the Fluids Engineering Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (2005), the Silver Medal for Physical Acoustics from the Acoustical Society of America, the European Fluid Mechanics prize and the Modesto Panetti & Carlo Ferrari International Prize for Applied Mechanics Academy of Sciences of Turin (Italy) in 2014, and the 2016 Ted Belytschko Applied Mechanics Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. In 2012 he was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering, and in 2016 he was appointed as a Homewood Professor at Johns Hopkins University.
He has served as the Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Multiphase Flow since 2008 as well as a member of the Editorial Committee for the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics from 2007-2011 and as the Associate Editor for Letter for The Physics of Fluids from 2002-2007. He has held various positions with both the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and with the American Physical Society.
While at Johns Hopkins, he has supervised 33 students through the PhD process and nine through the Masters process in addition to 10 graduate students and 20 post-doctoral fellows. He has had a profound impact on the Department’s graduate program through his long-standing and superb commitment to the teaching of graduate courses, in particular in the area of applied mathematics, and even with all his other commitments, found time to author a valuable textbook in this important discipline. He has instilled a very high level of excellence in the graduate program that has had tremendous impact on the entire department for many years. For many years he served as the Program Chair for the Johns Hopkins part-time Masters’ program in mechanical engineering.
We thank him for his generosity, good humor, and dedication and wish him well at the University of Houston.