Dean of USC Viterbi School of Engineering
In 2005 Yortsos was appointed interim dean of the USC Engineering School at the newly renamed USC Viterbi School of Engineering for the interim period of one year. In 2006,after an external search process,formally appointed as Dean of Engineering. [13]
Yortsos was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering in 2008 and served on the NAE Council between 2017 and 2023. His election citation reads:"For fundamental advances in fluid flow,transport,and reactions in porous media applied to the recovery of subsurface resources." In 2025,he delivered the Plenary Lecture of the 2025 Annual Meeting of the NAE on “AI and Engineering Education”. He was also elected as Associate Member of the Academy of Athens in 2013 and as Foreign Member of the Indian National Academy of Engineering in 2024. Yortsos was awarded a 2014 Ellis Island Medal of Honor for his contributions as a first-generation American to engineering education and research [14] . He received the 2008 Western North America Reservoir Description and Dynamics Award of the Society of Petroleum Engineers,an Honorary Member Award from AIME in 2011,and was elected as AIChE Fellow in 2024.
As dean,Yortsos articulated the term "Engineering+",which encapsulates the nature of engineering to empower practically all disciplines in today's rapidly converging world and to help create a better world for all humanity. [15] In partnership with his colleagues,Tom Katsouleas,then Dean of the Duke Pratt School of Engineering and Rick Miller,then President of Olin College of Engineering,he co-founded in 2009 the Grand Challenges Scholars Program (GCSP), [16] designed to educate the engineering students who will address the Grand Challenges of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE),articulated in 2008. In 2010 Dean Yortsos organized and hosted the Second Grand Challenges Summit at USC,which subsequently morphed into a series of bi-annual Grand Challenges Summits worldwide,organized by the National Academy of Engineering,the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Chinese Academy of Engineering. For the creation of the GCSP,which today has expanded to almost one hundred engineering schools around the world,the NAE awarded to Yortsos and his colleagues the 2022 NAE Gordon Prize. [17]
Under Yortsos's tenure as dean,the Viterbi School faculty size has grown in size and demographics. Five academic departments were named during that period (the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science in 2005,the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2006,Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2007,the Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering in 2022,and the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science in 2023). He helped establish a number of joint programs with other schools within USC,including USC Games in 2006,a partnership with the USC School of Cinematic Arts,the Health Technology and Engineering in 2008,a partnership with the USC Keck School of Medicine,and the Center for AI in Society (CAIS) in 2016 in partnership with the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. In 2009 Dean Yortsos established the Department of Astronautical Engineering. In 2011 he helped establish the first Academic Center to host a Quantum Computer (D-Wave) [18] . In 2013 he created the first Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship program in Engineering at USC.
In 2010 he led the creation of the iPodia program, that allows students from multiple peer universities across the world to take a joint class together. Since its inception,the corresponding iPodia Alliance has grown to 17 engineering schools across the globe,enhancing the national composition of students,and providing access to education regardless of national borders or cultures. [19]
Yortsos was on the peer review team (1995-1996) of the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Disposal Peer Review Team of the Department of Energy. He served on the National Research Council Committees for the 2017 report on a New Vision for Center-Based Engineering Research [20] as well as on the 2017 report on The Value of Social,Behavioral,and Economic Sciences to National Priorities [21] . In 2020 he completed a three-year term as member of the NSF Engineering Advisory Committee [22] .
Between 2011 and 2017 he served on the executive committee of the Engineering Deans Council and on the Executive Committee of the Global Engineering Deans Council (2012-2016,2021- 2023). Following the onset of the COVID-19 epidemic,he led the National Academy of Engineering Call to Action Against COVID,starting in April 2020.
From 2013 through 2022,Yortsos served as Principal Investigator of the National Science Foundation (NSF) I-Corps Innovation Node Los Angeles,a partnership between USC,Caltech and UCLA,one of nine in the nation. Starting in January 2022 he served as the PI of the NSF’s I-Corps West Region Hub,a partnership with UCLA,the University of Colorado,and ten other affiliated universities (Caltech,Colorado School of Mines,UC Riverside,University of New Mexico,the University of Utah,UC Santa Barbara and Colorado State University),which is now one of the NSF's ten I-Corps Hubs [23] .
From 2012 to 2017 Yortsos served as Chair of the American Society for Engineering Education's (ASEE) Engineering Deans Council Diversity Committee. In this capacity,he led in 2015 a diversity initiative,highlighted at the White House in August 2015,that has been implemented by more than 250 engineering schools in the US. in a formal ASEE initiative In 2017,the ASEE honored the Viterbi School under Dean Yortsos with its President's Award [24] . During that year,the ASEE also honored the Viterbi School and Dean Yortsos with an Award for Excellence in Veterans in Engineering
Throughout his tenure as dean,Yortsos has advocated a “change of conversation”about engineering,which is positioned as the enabling discipline of our times. As a result of this narrative,the demographic constituency of USC Viterbi students has expanded. Since 2019 the entering fall class in engineering has been gender-balanced. Between 2018 and 2021,Yortsos served as the PI of the NSF Gender Equity Initiative EDGE [25] . For many of these and related contributions he was awarded the 2023 Chairman's Award from the Great Minds in STEM [26] and the 2024 Claire L. Felbinger Award of ABET [27] .
In advancing human-centric engineering solutions under Yortsos's Engineering+ narrative,USC Viterbi also offered some classes that address global challenges. A notable course offered through Civil Engineering included the journey of USC students to a refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesvos. . A resulting PBS documentary "Lives Not Grades" that documented this effort and journey won a Los Angeles-area Emmy in 2022 [28] with Yortsos sharing the Emmy as Executive Producer. In related initiatives,he established the Engineering in Society Program (EIS),with an aim to provide to Viterbi engineering graduates not only with outstanding competence but also with outstanding character.
In the spring of 2024 Yortsos helped establish the new School of Advanced Computing at USC Viterbi. The creation of the new school within the USC Viterbi School of Engineering was made possible by the launch of an initiative on the Frontiers in Computing,enabled by a grant from the Lord Foundation of California,the largest educational gift in USC history [29] . The goals of the new entity are to advance digital competence and fluency across all engineering disciplines and to promote the solution of grand-challenge problems across various disciplines using advanced computing,including artificial intelligence and quantum information sciences,among many others.
In November 2022 Yortsos was appointed as Editor-in-Chief [30] of PNAS Nexus,founded in 2021. This gold open-access sibling of the PNAS Journal (and the only new journal of the National Academies in more than 100 years) aims to publish multidisciplinary,interdisciplinary,and transdisciplinary papers across all realms in the sciences,engineering,social sciences,and medicine.
In 2025,in recognition of his work in the advancement of engineering education,Yortsos was awarded an Honorary Doctoral Degree by the National Technical University of Athens,Greece [31] ,his undergraduate alma mater and the oldest engineering school in modern Greece,established in 1837. At the same year,Yortsos received the 2025 IFEES Duncan Fraser Global Award for Excellence in Engineering Education in recognition of his contributions to advancing engineering education worldwide [32] .
