Rate My Professor Spyros Kinnas

Professor Spyros Kinnas is a distinguished faculty member in Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, holding the position of Professor in the Fariborz Maseeh Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, as well as the Hudson Matlock Professorship in Civil Engineering. He serves as Associate Director of the Offshore Technology Research Center and founded the Ocean Engineering Group in 1995. Kinnas obtained his Ph.D. in Ocean Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985 and his Diploma in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, in 1981. Before joining UT Austin, he worked as a principal research engineer and lecturer in the Department of Ocean Engineering at MIT. His academic career at UT Austin encompasses teaching courses such as Fluid Mechanics, Introduction to Ocean Engineering, Computational Fluid Mechanics, Boundary Element Methods, and Theory of Propulsors and Turbines.

Kinnas specializes in Ocean Engineering, with research focusing on computational hydrodynamics applied to marine propulsors—including open, ducted, podded, contra-rotating, and surface-piercing propellers, water-jets—and tidal turbines, as well as dynamic control of floating offshore structures. His work addresses cavitation prediction and control to enhance efficiency, reduce erosion, noise, vibration, and thrust loss, supported by over 20 years of funding from the US Office of Naval Research and the Consortium on Cavitation involving companies like Wärtsilä, Rolls-Royce, SSPA, Kawasaki, ABS, and Andritz Hydro. Additional projects include hydrodynamic analysis for space shuttle propellant pumps with Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne and vortex-induced vibrations on offshore platforms using flume tests and TR-PIV to validate CFD tools, in collaboration with the Offshore Technology Research Center joint with Texas A&M University. Kinnas has earned the SNAME Fellow designation, served as the 2019/20 Weinblum Memorial Lecturer, and received departmental honors including the Teaching Award in 1999 and 2009, Ervin S. Perry Student Appreciation Award in 2008, Halliburton Young Faculty Award in 1998, and Innovative Instructional Technologies Award in 2001. He contributes to scientific committees of the International Symposia on Cavitation and Marine Propulsors, editorial boards of the Journal of Ship Research, Journal of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering, International Journal of Ocean Systems Engineering, and Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, and has chaired international conferences, with UT Austin hosting the 4th International Symposium on Marine Propulsors in 2015 and CAV2027.