Rate My Professor Bartosz Protas

Bartosz Protas is Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at McMaster University, a position he has held since July 2015. He previously served as Associate Professor from July 2009 to June 2015 and Assistant Professor from August 2003 to June 2009 at the same department. Earlier, he was a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the Flow Control Lab at the University of California, San Diego from November 2000 to August 2003. Protas earned dual Ph.D. degrees in June 2000: one in Mechanics from Warsaw University of Technology, Poland (with distinction), and one in Fluid Dynamics from Université Pierre et Marie Curie – Paris VI, France (la mention très honorable avec félicitations), awarded jointly through a cotutelle program. He also holds an M.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering, majoring in Computational Fluid Dynamics, from Warsaw University of Technology in July 1995 (with distinction).

His research centers on theoretical and computational fluid dynamics integrated with optimization and control theory, alongside applied mathematics, scientific computing, hydrodynamics, and industrial fluid mechanics. Representative publications include “Systematic Search For Extreme and Singular Behavior in Some Fundamental Models of Fluid Mechanics” (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 2022), “Vortex Dynamics Models in Flow Control Problems” (Nonlinearity, invited review, 2008), “Maximum Amplification of Enstrophy in 3D Navier-Stokes Flows” (Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2020), “Optimal Closures in a Simple Model for Turbulent Flows” (SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, 2020), and “Harnessing the Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability: Feedback Stabilization of an Inviscid Vortex Sheet” (Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2018). Protas received the Early Researcher Award in 2008 and the SHARCNET Chair in Scientific Computation from 2003 to 2005. He has held visiting professorships at institutions including University College Dublin, Kyoto University, Université de Rouen, and Institut PPrime. From 2009 to 2019, he directed McMaster's School of Computational Science and Engineering. Protas serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Computational Science and was on that of International Journal of Computer Mathematics until 2022. He has guest-edited special issues for Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A (2022) and Physica D (2024), and organized workshops and thematic programs at ICERM, Isaac Newton Institute, Fields Institute, and others.