Themis Sapsis

Dr. Sapsis is the William I. Koch Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering at MIT. He is also the Director of the Center for Ocean Engineering, as well as the Associate Director of MIT Sea Grant. He is affiliated with the Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS) and the Center for Computational Science and Engineering (CSSE), both within Schwarzman College of Computing. He received a Diploma in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering from Technical University of Athens, Greece and a Ph.D. in Mechanical and Ocean Engineering from MIT. Before his faculty appointment at MIT he served as Research Scientist at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. He has also been a visiting faculty at ETH-Zurich. Prof. Sapsis work lies on the interface of nonlinear dynamical systems, probabilistic modeling and data-driven methods. A particular emphasis of his work is the formulation of mathematical methods for the prediction, statistical quantification and optimization of complex engineering and physical systems with extreme transient features, such as turbulent fluid flows in engineering and geophysical settings, nonlinear waves, and extreme ship motions. He has received numerous awards including three Young Investigator Awards (Navy, Army and Air-Force research office), the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Award, the ASME Lloyd Hamilton Donnell Award, the Bodossaki Award on Basic Sciences: Mathematics, and more recently the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship by the DoD on Applied Mathematics and Computational Science.