June 23rd is International Women in Engineering Day. To mark the day during which women engineers celebrate their achievements, Women of Color Online highlights the recent appointment of Jayathi Y. Murthy as Oregon State University’s next president.

According to Oregon State University (OSU), Murthy, a national leader in higher education engineering teaching, research and service, and advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion, will become OSU's president on Sept. 9. She is the first woman of color to lead the land, sea, space, and sun grant university.

Murthy received a doctorate in mechanical engineering from the University of Minnesota, a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Washington State University, and a bachelor’s of technology degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, where she was named a distinguished alumna in 2012.

Recently, Murthy, 64, served as dean at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. Murthy was the first woman dean at UCLA’s engineering school, which has 190 faculty members and more than 6,000 undergraduate and graduate students. During her tenure, she made expanding access to a UCLA engineering education a top priority. This includes deepening relationships with local community colleges, increasing outreach to underrepresented minority groups, and easing the transition for transfer students.

“This is the right place and right time,” Murthy said in a statement. “I am very impressed by Oregon State University. OSU is well-positioned to address the many challenges in how higher education will be best provided in the years ahead thanks to the university’s excellent faculty, staff, and leaders, and its commitment to student success, inclusive excellence, and its long experience and leadership in online education.”

Murthy has been active in helping raise more than $330 million in philanthropy at UCLA. She also led the effort to establish Women in Engineering at UCLA – a program that supports the full participation of women in engineering.

Under Murthy’s leadership at UCLA, the engineering school focused on growth in areas critical to the 21st century, including engineering in medicine and biology; sustainable urban systems; artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science; cybersecurity and the future internet; robotics and cyber-physical systems; as well as advanced materials and manufacturing.

Before joining UCLA, Murthy was chair of the mechanical engineering department at the University of Texas at Austin and held the Ernest Cockrell, Jr. Memorial Chair in Engineering from 2012-2015. Prior to that, Murthy was a mechanical engineering professor at Purdue University from 2001-2011 and served as a professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh from 1998 to 2001.

While at Purdue and the University of Texas, Murthy served as the director of the Center for Prediction of Reliability, Integrity and Survivability of Microsystems (PRISM) from 2008 to 2014, a center of excellence supported by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

Murthy began her career at Arizona State University, where she was an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering from 1984 to 1988. From 1988 to 1998, Murthy worked at New Hampshire-based Fluent, Inc., a developer, and vendor of the world’s most widely used computational fluid dynamics software. She led the development of algorithms and software that still form the core of the company’s products. She has authored over 330 technical publications.

She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), a foreign fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE), a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and the recipient of many honors, including the ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award in 2016 and the ASME Electronic and Photonic Packaging Division Clock Award.

Her research interests include nanoscale heat transfer, computational fluid dynamics, and simulations of fluid flow and heat transfer for industrial applications. Recently, her focus is on sub-micron thermal transport, multiscale multi-physics simulations of micro-and nano-electromechanical systems (MEMS and NEMS), and the uncertainty quantifications involved in those systems.