Biography
Professor Tsotsis received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1978. He then joined the University of Southern California (USC), where he currently holds the title of the Robert E. Vivian Professor in Energy Resources in the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. He also served as the Department’s inaugural Chair in 2005. Professor Tsotsis’ research interests are in the areas of transport, adsorption and reaction in complex porous media, reaction engineering, reactor design, and membrane separations. He is the author of over 280 technical papers, several book chapters, eight U. S. and one European patent, and one book. He has also edited two Technical Meeting Proceedings volumes. He has worked on a broad array of problems, ranging from the abstract and theoretical (symmetry breaking instabilities, reaction rate oscillations) to the practical and applied (petroleum upgrading, and membrane reactors and bioreactors). Professor Tsotsis was the co-founder and a member of the executive board of USC’s NSF/IGERT Center in Environmental Engineering. He is a Fellow of the AIChE.
Education
Ph.D., Chemical Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana, 1978
M.S., Chemical Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana, 1976
B.S., Chemical Engineering, National Technical University, Athens, Greece, 1974
Awards/Honors
- 2017 Ed Ma Lectureship, WPI
- 2011 OCEC President’s Award
- 2009 Fellow of the AIChE
- 2002 Technical Co-Chair of the Meeting of the North American Membrane Society (NAMS)
- 1998 Technical Co-Chair of the 15th International Symposium on Chemical Reaction Engineering (ISCRE 15)
- 1992 UOP Invitational Lectureship
- 1986 Caltech Chevron Visiting Professor
- 1983 USC Research Scholar
- 1983 Welch Foundation Fellow
- 1981 USC Chevron Young Faculty Award
- 1980 Oak Ridge Associated Universities Fellowship
- 1974 National Student Award of the Greek Chemical Engineers