Julio M. Ottino is currently dean of the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Northwestern University, and he holds the titles Robert R. McCormick Institute Professor and Walter P. Murphy Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Northwestern. Ottino received a PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota, his BS in Argentina, and has held research chaired and senior positions at Caltech, Stanford, and the University of Minnesota. He taught for a number of years at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the Departments of Chemical Engineering and Polymer Science and Engineering.
Ottino has been at the McCormick School of Engineering since 1991. He served as chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering from 1992-2000. In addition, as a member of the 1998 and 2004 University-wide strategic planning committees which helped fashion The Highest Order of Excellence I and II, he was centrally involved in the University's long-range strategic planning process. He served as co-chair of an ad hoc group established by President Bienen to recommend future directions for the Basic Industry Research Laboratory (BIRL). Most recently, he has been instrumental in the creation of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO), of which he is currently co-director.
Ottino's research in fluids and granular matter has appeared on the covers of Nature, Science, Scientific American, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the US, and has impacted fields as diverse as fluid dynamics, granular dynamics, microfluidics, geophysical sciences, and nonlinear dynamics and chaos. He has been associate editor of several professional journals and serves currently as associate editor of the AIChE Journal, were he edits the cover-featured Perspective series. He is a senior technical advisor to Unilever and recently participated in the International Review of Engineering in the UK. Ottino's Kinematics of Mixing: Stretching, Chaos and Transport has become a classic. He has written well over 150 technical publications and has given several hundreds of invited research and technical presentations in industry and universities around the world on topics ranging from the purely technical to creativity and innovation. His current interests are in the area of complex systems.
Ottino has received several awards including the Alpha Chi Sigma Award and the William H. Walker Award of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. He has given numerous named lectureships including the Lacey Lectures at Caltech, the Corrsin Lecture in Johns Hopkins, and the Danckwerts Lecture in England. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
