University Provost Lawrence Dumas announced Tuesday that Prof. Julio Ottino has been appointed the new dean of the McCormick School of Engineering.
“(Ottino) seems like the best person to lead McCormick at this time,” Dumas said. “He will make a very good school even better.”
Ottino, a professor of chemical and biological engineering, said he wants to build on McCormick’s strengths and lead the school to find its competitive edge against peer engineering schools by working with other schools at Northwestern.
“We’re surrounded by very good schools, and we can have interactions with Feinberg (School of Medicine), even the law school, the School of Communication and Kellogg (School of Management),” Ottino said. “We have a real opportunity for setting trends.”
Ottino added McCormick needs to build the type of nationally recognized reputation that other NU schools have.
“Kellogg has it. Medill has it,” Ottino said. “If McCormick were like an orchestra, (then) we have very gifted individual players, but we have to produce great music by producing a more unified sound. We don’t have the altogetherness kind of aspect (yet).”
Ottino joined the NU faculty in 1991 and he has had great visibility both within and outside of the university community, Dumas said.
As a researcher, Ottino’s work on fluid mechanics and complex systems has appeared as the cover story of science journals such as Nature, Science, Scientific American and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
He was selected in 1997 to join the National Academies, which advises the government on its scientific and technological endeavors.
Ottino has also been an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which develops policy alternatives, since 2003.
Ottino is the current director and adviser for the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, which researches ways to interpret these diverse systems — in which a large number of elements interact — by looking at the systems as whole and not their individual parts.
Last November, Ottino and 25 other experts from prestigious American and European universities evaluated the research enterprises in the United Kingdom. The group’s final report will advise the British government on the impact of its resources on various fields of engineering, including medicine, the environment and power transmissions.
Ottino’s macro-perspective in his work makes him a good leader, said John Birge, former dean of McCormick.
“He has a great vision for engineering and an intense awareness of Northwestern overall and for McCormick in particular,” said Birge, who left NU last year. “It fits Northwestern very well.”
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