Igor Mezić

Mezić has received numerous awards and honors for his research work in fields of physics, mathematics (Sloan Fellowship) and engineering. In 2015, he was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society, for "fundamental contributions to the theory of three-dimensional chaotic advection, measures and control of mixing, and development of a spectral operator theory approach to decomposition of complex fluid flows". He was elected as a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2017 (SIAM Fellow), "for sustained innovation at the dynamical systems theory/applications interface; notably for advances in the use of Koopman operator theory". In 2022, Mezić was elected Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for contributions to modeling and control using Koopman operator techniques. In 2019, Mezic was inaugurated as the first ever Honoris Professor at his Alma Mater, University of Rijeka, Croatia. He is the recipient of the 2021 J. D. Crawford Prize, a biennial award presented by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) for achievements in the field of dynamical systems.

Mezić was a postdoctoral fellow at the Mathematics Institute of the University of Warwick in the UK from 1994 to 1995, and joined Mechanical Engineering Faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1995. He moved to the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University in 2000 before returning to University of California, Santa Barbara, where he became a Full Professor in 2003.

He graduated from the Mechanical Engineering Department at University of Rijeka, Croatia in 1990, with a Diploma in Engineering, and got the Ph.D. degree from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), within the Applied Mechanics program, with a thesis in Dynamical Systems Theory, in 1994, under supervision of Stephen R. Wiggins.