Jayathi Murthy Selected as Next Dean of UCLA Engineering

Feb 6, 2015

By UCLA Samueli Newsroom

Jayathi Y. Murthy has been selected as dean of the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, effective January 1, 2016.

UCLA Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Scott Waugh announced the appointment today.

Since 2012, Murthy has served as the Ernest Cockrell Jr. Department Chair and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. She was director of PRISM: NNSA Center for Prediction of Reliability, Integrity and Survivability of Microsystems, from 2008 to 2014. A member of the faculty at Purdue University from 2001 to 2011, Murthy served as the Robert V. Adams Professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering.

While at Carnegie Mellon University from 1998 to 2001, she served as associate professor of mechanical engineering. From 1999 to 2001 she was director of the Thermal Management, Electronics Cooling, and Packaging Laboratory Institute for Complex Engineered Systems. During her 1988-to-1998 employment at Fluent Inc., a leading vendor of computational fluid dynamics software, she developed the unstructured solution-adaptive finite volume methods underlying their flagship software Fluent, and the electronics cooling software package ICEPAK. More recently, her research has addressed sub-micron thermal transport, multiscale multiphysics simulations of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and nano-electro-mechanical systems (NEMS), and uncertainty quantification in these systems.

Murthy received a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Minnesota, an M.S. from Washington State University and a Bachelor of Technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology. She is the recipient of many honors including the IBM Faculty Partnership Award 2003-2005, the 2009 ASME EPPD Woman Engineer of the Year Award, the 2012 ASME EPPD Clock Award and numerous best paper awards. In 2012, she was named a distinguished alumna of the Indian Institute of Technology.

She serves on the editorial boards of Numerical Heat Transfer and International Journal of Thermal Sciences and is an editor of the 2nd edition of the Handbook of Numerical Heat Transfer. She is a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the author of more than 280 technical publications.

Vice Chancellor Waugh thanked the search committee chaired by Joseph Rudnick, dean of the UCLA Division of Physical Sciences.

He also recognized and thanked Dean Vijay K. Dhir for his distinguished leadership of the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science since February 2002.

Dhir welcomed the selection of Murthy.

“Jayathi Murthy is a terrific choice to guide the school to the new and greater heights,” Dhir said. “UCLA Engineering will soon get to know a passionate teacher and dedicated scholar – someone who is a proven leader deeply committed to excellence in education and research. In turn, Professor Murthy will find that UCLA Engineering faculty, students and staff, as well as our alumni and friends, are working together to push the boundaries of innovation and address the greatest challenges facing society. I look forward to working with her during her transition and will help in any way I can to ensure her success.”

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