Jennifer Curtis

Jennifer Sinclair Curtis is a Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering. She served as Dean of the College of Engineering at the University of California, Davis from 2015-2020.  She is a Fellow of AAAS, AIChE and ASEE. Professor Curtis is a recipient of the Thomas and Donna Edgar CACHE Award for Excellence in Computing in Chemical Engineering Education, Fulbright Senior Research Scholar Award, AIChE’s Thomas-Baron Award in Fluid-Particle Systems, AIChE’s Fluidization Lectureship Award, AIChE’s van Antwerpen Award, ASEE’s Chemical Engineering Lectureship Award, Eminent Overseas Lectureship Award by the Institution of Engineers in Australia, ASEE’s Sharon Keillor Award for Women in Engineering, and NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award.  Professor Curtis received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Purdue University (1983) and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University (1989). Professor Curtis’ particulate flow models have been extensively adopted by both commercial and open source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software packages.  She was the first to partner with ANSYS Fluent to greatly expand the multi-phase simulation capability of the code which is used by 96 of the 100 biggest industrial companies in the world and over 40,000 customers.  Her particulate flow models are also included in the CFD Research Corporation software package and the open-source CFD codes OpenFOAM and MFIX.  She currently serves on the National Academies’ Board of Chemical Sciences and Technology. She served as Dean of the UC Davis College of Engineering from 2015-2020.