Rate My Professor Petros Koumoutsakos

Petros Koumoutsakos is the Herbert S. Winokur, Jr. Professor of Computing in Science and Engineering and Area Chair of Applied Mathematics at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He holds a Diploma in Naval Architecture from the National Technical University of Athens, an M.Eng. in Naval Architecture from the University of Michigan, and a Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Applied Mathematics from the California Institute of Technology. He conducted postdoctoral studies at the Center for Parallel Computing at Caltech, and at the Center for Turbulent Research at Stanford University and NASA Ames. Prior to joining Harvard in 2021, he served as Chair of Computational Science at ETH Zurich from 1997 to 2020. He has held visiting fellow positions at Caltech, the University of Tokyo, MIT, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard University, and is Distinguished Affiliated Professor at Technical University of Munich. Koumoutsakos is affiliated with departments of Applied Physics, Bioengineering, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Environmental Science and Engineering, and Materials and Mechanical Engineering at Harvard.

His research centers on the fundamentals and applications of computing and artificial intelligence for understanding, predicting, and optimizing complex systems, particularly fluid flows in engineering, nanotechnology, and medicine. Key areas include active matter, computational science and engineering, control theory and stochastic systems, data science, machine learning, fluid mechanics, soft matter, bioinspired robotics and computing, and energy systems. He leads the Computational Science and Engineering Lab and has spearheaded a high-performance computing study with Citadel Securities and Google Cloud to advance heart disease research. Koumoutsakos is an elected Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, American Physical Society, Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and Collegium Helveticum. He received the European Research Council's Advanced Investigator Award, the ACM Gordon Bell Prize in Supercomputing, and the PRACE High Performance Computing Excellence Award in 2023. He was elected an International Member of the US National Academy of Engineering. His scholarly impact is evidenced by over 38,000 citations and an h-index of 90 on Google Scholar. Notable publications include 'Feature point tracking and trajectory analysis for video imaging in cell biology' (2005) and 'Neural Network Modeling for Near Wall Turbulent Flow' (2002).