Professor
Themistoklis Sapsis
- William I. Koch Professor
- Professor of Mechanical Engineering
- Director, Center for Ocean Engineering
- Director, MIT Maritime Consortium
Interests
- Quantification and prediction of extremes events in complex systems
- Reduced order modeling of chaotic and turbulent systems
- Fluid dynamics in engineering and geophysics
Bio
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, Director of the MIT Maritime Consortium, as well as the Associate Director of MIT Sea Grant. He is a core member of the Center for Computational Science and Engineering (CSSE), as well as affiliated with the Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS) , 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 the prediction, statistical modeling and optimization for extreme events in complex systems. His work has been applied in areas such as extreme events in ship design, quantifying risk for climate extremes, and understanding rare events in engineering turbulence and nonlinear waves. 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 DoW on Applied Mathematics and Computational Science.
Faculty Details
Education
-
2005
NATIONAL TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS
Diploma -
2011
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (MIT)
Ph.D.
Research Interests
- Extreme events
- Ship design
- Uncertainty quantification and prediction
- Turbulent systems
- Nonlinear water waves
- Climate modeling
- Random vibrations
Online Data
Honors + Awards
- 2024, Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, DoW, Applied and Computational Mathematics
- 2021, Bodossaki Award on Basic Sciences: Mathematics
- 2020, Verisk AI Faculty Research Award
- 2020, MathWorks Faculty Research Innovation Fellowship, MIT
- 2017, Doherty Associate Professor Chair in Ocean Utilization, MIT
- 2016, Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award
- 2015, Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award
- 2015, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Ocean Sciences
- 2015, Army Research Office Young Investigator Award
- 2015, Office of Naval Research - Summer Faculty Research Program Fellow
- 2013, Recipient of the first American Bureau of Shipping Career Development Chair, MIT
Memberships
- American Physical Society
- American Society of Mechanical Engineers
- Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics
- Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers
- International Society of Offshore and Polar Engineers
Professional Service
- 2023- Journal of Nonlinear Science
- 2017- SIAM/ASA Journal of Uncertainty Quantification
- 2022- International Journal of Non-Linear Mechanics
- 2016- International Journal of Offshore and Polar Engineering
- 2017-2023 Nature-Springer Journal of Nonlinear Dynamics
- 2017-2018 ASME Journal of Computational and Nonlinear Dynamics, Guest Editor
- 2014-2016 Journal of Ocean and Wind Energy
Teaching
- 2.121/2.122 Stochastic Systems
- 2.003 Dynamics and Control
- 2.700/2.701 Principles of Naval Architecture
- 2.081/16.230 Plates and Shells: Static and Dynamic Analysis