Julio Mario Ottino is dean of the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University, where he is also Distinguished Robert R. McCormick Institute Professor, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, and professor (by courtesy) of mechanical engineering. He previously held positions at the University of Massachusetts Amherst as well as chair and senior appointments at the California Institute of Technology and Stanford University, and has supervised more than 50 PhD theses. He is the founder and former director of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO).

Dr. Ottino’s research in fluid dynamics, chaos and nonlinear dynamics, and complex systems has been featured in articles and on the covers of Nature, Science, Scientific American, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, and other publications and has impacted fields as diverse as complex systems, microfluidics, geophysical sciences, and nonlinear dynamics and chaos. He has written more than 220 papers; one of his monographs has been cited over 2,600 times.

In addition to his election to the National Academy of Engineering (1997) and American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2003), Dr. Ottino has been selected as a Guggenheim fellow (2001) and American Physical Society (APS) fellow (1993). He has received numerous national awards, including the Alpha Chi Sigma Award for Chemical Engineering Research (1994) and William H. Walker Award for Excellence in Contributions to Chemical Engineering Literature (2001) from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) and the APS Fluid Dynamics Prize (2008). Also in 2008 he was identified by the AIChE as one of the “100 Engineers of the Modern Era,” and in 2010 he was selected to deliver the AIChE Institute Lecture.

He has chaired committees for the National Science Foundation, National Research Council, and National Academy of Engineering; was a member of the International Review of Engineering in the United Kingdom; and has served on multiple visiting boards for nonprofit organizations and educational institutions in the United States. He was a senior advisor to Unilever, a member of the technical advisory board of Dow Chemical, and the science board of AkzoNobel. He has consulted for 3M, DSM, Rohm & Haas, B.F. Goodrich, Merck, Baxter, and others.

Dr. Ottino grew up in Argentina with twin interests in the physical sciences and visual arts. He received his PhD in chemical engineering at the University of Minnesota.