Paulo R. de Souza Mendes

Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro

Mechanical Engineer

Fellow, Elected 2023

Prof. Paulo R. de Souza Mendes received his BS (1976) and MS (1979) in Mechanical Engineering from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), and his PhD in Mechanical Engineering (minor in Fluid Mechanics) from the University of Minnesota (1982). He is currently Professor of Mechanical Engineering at PUC-Rio. He currently serves as President of the International Committee on Rheology (2020-2023), Research Fellow of the Brazilian Government Agency CNPq, highest rank (1-A) and Scientist of the Rio de Janeiro State (Faperj), full member of the Brazilian National Academy of Engineering, and past president and founder of the Brazilian Society of Rheology (www.sbreologia.com.br). He is listed within the top 2% researchers worldwide in the 2021 “Updated science-wide author databases of standardized citation indicators,” that includes all areas of knowledge. Member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics and of Advances in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. Past member of the Scientific Council of the International Centre for Heat and Mass Transfer. Served as Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota (Chemical Engineering), 1991-1993, Visiting Professor at Stanford University (Chemical Engineering), 2011, and Visiteur Scientifique at IFP Energies Nouvelles (France), 2012-1013. He has long experience in the areas of fluid mechanics, rheology, and heat and mass transfer, acting mainly in the following subjects: flows of non-Newtonian fluids, constitutive equations, thixotropy and other types of time dependence, elasto-viscoplastic materials, rheology of interfaces, emulsions, general rheometry, and liquid-liquid and gas-liquid displacement flows. He cooperates intensively with industrial partners since the 1980’s, including Petrobras, Vale, CSN (Brazilian National Steel Manufacturing Company), Shell, Statoil/Equinor, Sinochem and others. He is the founder and head of the GReo (Rheology Group) at PUC-Rio, a research group sponsored by Industry and Government agencies involving about 40 people—faculty, researchers, technicians, postdocs, students— and equipped with a scanning electron microscope, seven modern rheometers, and a wide variety of last generation instruments.