invited speakers

Yannis C. Yortsos

Yannis C. Yortsos is Dean of the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California, the Chester F. Dolley Professor of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, and holder of the Zohrab A. Kaprielian Dean's Chair in Engineering. He was appointed dean of the Viterbi School in 2005. Yortsos had served as associate dean for academic affairs at the Viterbi School from 2001 to 2003, and as senior associate dean for academic affairs from July 2003 to May 2005. He was chairman of the USC Department of Chemical Engineering from 1991 to 1997.

Yortsos received his B.Sc. degree from the National Technical University, Athens, Greece, in 1973, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the California Institute of Technology in 1974 and 1979 respectively, all in chemical engineering. He joined USC in 1979 as an assistant professor of petroleum and chemical engineering and was promoted to the ranks of associate professor in 1984 and full professor in 1990. His professional experience includes invited faculty appointments at the Universit¨¦ Paris, Orsay, France in 1997, 1999 and 2001, and at the Universit¨¦ Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, France, in 1990 and 1997; and an associate researcher appointment at France¡¯s Centre National de la Recherch¨¦ Scientifique in 1999. Yortsos was a visiting professor in the departments of chemical engineering at Caltech in 2001, and at Stanford University in 1986, and in the department of mathematics and computer science at Clarkson University in 1986. As a student, he held summer training appointments in the Serlachius Oy Paper Factory in Mantta, Finland in 1972, and in Gaz de France in Strasbourg, France in 1971.

Yortsos has been actively involved in peer review of the Yucca Mountain Project for the disposal of high-level radioactive waste. He was a member of the Peer Review Committee on Thermal Hydrology in 1995, a member of the Panel on Expert Elicitation on the Near-Field/Altered Zone Environment in 1997-1998, and an advisor to the TSPA-VA Peer Review Committee in 1998-1999.

Yortsos, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (2008), and a Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences (2001), is the recipient of many other honors and awards, including the Society of Petroleum Engineers Western North America Reservoir Description and Dynamics Award (2008); the Kapitza Medal of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences (2001); the Distinguished Educator Award from the Orange County Engineering Council (2000); the USC Chester F. Dolley Chair in Petroleum Engineering (1995); the Rossiter W. Raymond Award of the AIME for Outstanding Technical Paper by an author younger than 33 years of age (1985); the Distinguished Service Award of Pi Epsilon Tau (1984); the ARCO Oil and Gas Outstanding Jr. Faculty Award (1981); and a Greek government scholarship for his undergraduate studies (1968-1973). He served as executive editor of Society of Petroleum Engineers Journal and has served on the editorial boards of several journals, including Transport in Porous Media, the SIAM Journal on Multiscale Modeling and Simulation, the Society of Petroleum Engineers Journal and the Journal of the American Mathematical Society. He is currently editor-in-chief of all SPE technical journals, which publish up to 300 peer-reviewed papers per year. Yortsos currently serves as a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy; he is a University Fellow of the USC Center of Public Diplomacy; a board member of Tsinghua University¡¯s School of Information Science and Technology International Advisory Committee (Beijing, China); on the Advisory Board of the Institute of the Environment, National Research Center Demokritos, Athens, Greece; a member of the Board of the Alfred Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering and the Keston Institute for Infrastructure; and a member of the California Polytechnic University San Luis Obispo School of Engineering Dean¡¯s Advisory Council.

Yortsos' research and teaching interests are in the general areas of fluid flow, transport and reaction processes in porous and fractured media. Yortsos has supervised 27 Ph.D. thesis candidates and eight post-doctoral researchers, and was the external examiner of seven Ph.D. theses at the University of California, Berkeley; Alberta University, Canada; University of Bergen, Norway; University of Paris VI and University of Paris XI, France; and Delft University, Holland. His research has been supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Petroleum Research Fund, and various oil companies.

Yortsos has published more than 145 refereed publications, delivered more than 110 invited presentations and presented more than 80 conference papers. His published studies include: steam injection, heat transfer, in-situ combustion and thermal recovery processes in porous media; the development of analytical solutions to mathematical models of transport in porous media; viscous flow instabilities in porous media and Hele-Shaw cells; viscous flows in constricted geometries; filtration and formation damage in porous media; application of percolation theory to immiscible displacement, adsorption and reaction processes in porous media; application of fractal geometry to the identification of parameters in the subsurface; the evolution of gas in phase change in porous media, as in boiling and related geothermal problems; the modeling of mass transfer in porous media with application to soil remediation; and the application of optimization methods in subsurface flows.

Sustainable Energy and Information Technology

Transitioning from the current state of energy supply and demand into one based on renewable sources is a daunting, albeit inevitable, in the long term, task. In this talk, I will present some of the fundamental issues of this challenge and outline the important role that information technology and more generally, engineering, can play to facilitate and enable this transition.