Jayathi Murthy

Jayathi Y. Murthy is an Indian-American mechanical engineer whose research interests include macroelectronics, computational fluid dynamics, heat transfer, and phase-change materials. She is the Ronald and Valerie Sugar Dean of the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a distinguished professor at UCLA. She has also served on the Engineering and Computer Science jury for the Infosys Prize from 2018.

Education and career

Murthy is the daughter of an Indian civil engineer. Originally from Hyderabad, she was a student at St. Ann's High School, Secunderabad. After graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, she earned a master's degree at Washington State University before completing her Ph.D. in mechanical engineering in 1984 at the University of Minnesota.

She became an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Arizona State University in 1984, but left academia in 1988 to co-found Fluent Inc., a computational fluid dynamics firm that was later acquired by Ansys. She returned to academia in 1998 as an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, moved to Purdue University in 2001, and became Robert V. Adams Professor of Mechanical Engineering there in 2008. She moved again to the University of Texas at Austin in 2012, as department chair, before becoming dean at UCLA in 2016, the first woman to hold that position.

Recognition

Murthy was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2020, "for the development of unstructured solution-adaptive finite volume methods for heat, mass, and momentum transport". She is also a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). With Brent W. Webb and Raj M. Manglik, she won the ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award in 2016, and she was the 2012 winner of the ASME K16 Clock Award for "outstanding and continuing contributions to the science and engineering of heat transfer in electronics".