Julio M. Ottino

  • Dean, Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science

Dr. Julio Mario Ottino is the dean of the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University, where he holds the titles of Distinguished Robert R. McCormick Institute Professor and Walter P. Murphy Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering. Previously, Ottino was chair of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and founding co-director of NICO, the Northwestern Institute for Complex Systems, run jointly by McCormick and the Kellogg School of Management.

Ottino is a distinguished researcher and scholar and a member of prestigious US academies. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (1997) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2003). His research 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 supervised more than 45 PhD theses and written over 200 papers; one of his books has been cited over 2,000 times.

Ottino has been a Guggenheim fellow and American Physical Society fellow. He has been the recipient of numerous national awards, including the Alpha Chi Sigma Award and the William H. Walker from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) and, in 2008, of the Fluid Dynamics Prize from the American Physical Society. In 2008 he was also selected by the AIChE as one of the “One Hundred Engineers of the Modern Era”, and in 2010 he was selected to deliver the 62nd Institute Lecture of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. He has chaired committees for National Research Council, the National Science Foundation, and the 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 non-profit organizations and educational institutions in the United States. He was a senior adviser 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. He has lectured widely in the US and abroad on a broad range of topics to audiences ranging from CEOs and Board of Directors to the Intelligence Community.

Ottino received his PhD in chemical engineering at the University of Minnesota, started his career at UMass/Amherst in Chemical Engineering and Polymer Science and Engineering, and held chaired and senior appointments at Caltech and Stanford.