Petros Koumoutsakos

Born 1963 in Gythion, Laconia Greece.

Koumoutsakos studied at the National Technical University of Athens from 1981 until 1986 and received his master’s degree in Naval Architecture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1987. He continued his graduate studies at the California Institute of Technology where he received a master’s degree in aeronautics in 1988 and a PhD in aeronautics and applied mathematics in 1992.

During 1992 until 1994 he was a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow in parallel supercomputing at the California Institute of Technology. Since 1994 he has been a senior research associate and maintains an active affiliation with the Center for Turbulence Research (CTR) at NASA Ames/Stanford University. From 1997 to 2000 he was an assistant professor in Computational Fluid Dynamics at the ETH Zurich. In 2000 he was promoted to full professor of Computational Science at ETH Zurich.

His research activities are in the areas of particle methods, stochastic optimization and biologically inspired computation as they are applied to problems of interest in fluid mechanics, nanotechnology and cell biology. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Computational Physics and on the editorial board of the Journal of Theoretical and Computational Nanotechnology.

Juror for the discipline exact sciences of the art, science & business program for the fellowship generation 2007–2009.