Professor Katepalli R. Sreenivasan, the Harold W. Cheel Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Physics and Applied Physics, was elected in 1999 to the National Academy of Engineering. He is the first person to be elected to NAE from Yale.

Professor Sreenivasan was also elected in 1999 to the Third World Academy of Sciences, Trieste, Italy, and to the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Science.

Katepalli Sreenivasan was born and educated in India. After obtaining a Ph.D. (with gold medal) in Aeronautics from the Indian Institute of Science, he did post-doctoral work at the Universities of Sydney and Newcastle in Australia and at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

He joined Yale as Assistant Professor of Engineering and Applied Science in 1979, was promoted to Professor of Mechanical Engineering in 1985 and appointed as the Harold W. Cheel Professor in 1988. He served as the Chairman of Mechanical Engineering between 1987 and 1992 and was the Acting Chairman of the, then, Council of Engineering in 1989.

Professor Sreenivasan has a broad range of research interests and is known for his work in fluid dynamics, especially turbulence and other nonlinear phenomena. He is active in the affairs of the American Physical Society and of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Among the honors received by Professor Sreenivasan are Humboldt Fellowship (1983), Guggenheim Fellowship (1989), Fellowship of the Society of Scholars, Johns Hopkins University (1991), Distinguished Alumnus Award, Aerospace Department, Indian Institute of Science (1992), Otto Laporte Award, American Physical Society (1995), and the Distinguished Scholar Award of the American Chapter of the Indian Physics Association (1996). He was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society (1985), Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineering (1993), member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering (1988), Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science (1997), and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1998). He has been a visiting professor at Caltech., Rockefeller University, Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and Jawaharlal Nehru Center for the Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore, India; he is currently visiting the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences as the Rothschild Professor.