Andreas Acrivos

City College of New York

1928 – Present

Chemical Engineer

Awarded Bingham Medal 1994

Fellow, Elected 2015

Andreas Acrivos obtained his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Syracuse University in 1950. He then continued his chemical engineering studies at the University of Minnesota, obtaining his M.S. in 1951 and Ph.D in 1954. In 1954 he was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, attaining the rank of Professor in 1959. In 1962 he accepted a position at Stanford University where he remained for 26 years, serving as Chair of the Chemical Engineering Department from 1972 to 1975. In 1983-84, he held a visiting position as Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at the California Institute of Technology. In 1988 he accepted the position of Albert Einstein Professor of Science & Engineering and Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering at City College New York (CCNY) where he served as Director of the Levich Institute for Physico-Chemical Hydrodynamics from 1988 to 2001. He retired with Professor Emeritus status at both City College and Stanford in 2001.

Acrivos spent most of his career studying the properties of particulate systems such as suspensions, emulsions, and fiber-filled systems. Along with Howard Brenner and George Batchelor, he is largely responsible for our modern focus on the interconnections between the microstructure and microrheology of these materials and their macroscopic flow properties. His papers, coauthored with Frankel, on concentrated suspensions are among the most oft-cited works in the literature of these systems. But it is his collection of papers that combine experimentation and theory on the structure of dense suspensions subject to shear-induced self-diffusion that have had the most far-reaching and long-lasting impact on the field.

His role as a mentor to future researchers in rheology is most notable, and he has single-handedly populated The Society of Rheology with many of its most productive members. Acrivos is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and American Chemical Society, and a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, American Physical Society, and American Academy of Arts & Science. He was a Guggenheim fellow (1960, 1977) and a member of the US National Committee on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from 1980 to 2000. He served the American Institute of Physics as Editor of Physics of Fluids A from 1982-1997, in which capacity he substantially reoriented the journal to contain many papers of fundamental interest to rheologists. He has received many honors, including being made the namesake of two awards: the American Institute of Chemical Engineers Andreas Acrivos Award for Professional Progress in Chemical Engineering and the American Physical Society’s Andreas Acrivos Dissertation Award in Fluid Dynamics. Acrivos was the 2001 National Medal of Science Awardee and is one of the foremost fluid dynamicists of the 20th Century.