In Fotis Sotiropoulos’ first statement to the Penn State community upon his start as the university’s new executive vice president and provost in August, the proud alum pledged to “lead with a commitment to the many expressions of excellence that define Penn State—from groundbreaking research and inspiring teaching to institutional innovation and public service.” It was a pledge backed up by his résumé, which includes pioneering research in computational fluid dynamics, time as a distinguished professor, and innovative leadership at academic institutions and world-renowned research centers.

Most recently, Sotiropoulos ’89 MS Eng served as provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he helped reverse a decadelong enrollment decline, advanced AI literacy efforts for all students, and increased sponsored research funding by 39%.

At Penn State, Sotiropoulos oversees all academic units, including colleges and campuses, and major academic support units such as University Libraries, Student Affairs, and Educational Equity, among others, and serves as a member of the President’s Council, the chair of the Academic Leadership Council, and as an ex-officio member of the University Faculty Senate and Senate Council.

We sat down with him in mid-August, just as he was settling back into his first “hometown” in the U.S.

PENN STATER: You’re originally from Greece. What drew you to Penn State for your master’s degree? 

SOTIROPOULOS: I did my undergrad in mechanical engineering at the University of Athens back in 1986, when there was the [space shuttle] Challenger disaster. I was really fascinated by such an incredible engineering marvel, and the hubris of humans to build massive rockets to go to space, and then a small design error causes the whole [explosion], right? I saw this as the challenge of my generation: Through engineering I wanted to try to be part of this, to do better, to reach higher. So I decided to focus on rockets and jet engines. I did my undergraduate thesis in that area in Greece, and then when I was looking for universities to come to in the U.S., Penn State had—still has—a very strong group in turbomachinery. So I came here to work with a faculty member in turbomachinery. 

But when I arrived here, I was introduced to somebody who was working at the Applied Research Laboratory. And there I found out about all the great work that ARL was doing that had to do with the design of ships, with weapons, with propellers. And I was drawn into the area of water flows. So I finished my master’s in that area. If I had not come to Penn State, if I had not been introduced to ARL, I would be doing completely different things today.

PS: Tell us about your proudest achievement in computational fluid dynamics research.

SOTIROPOULOS: I’ve written over 250 journal papers, and I am proud that the results of my computational work have been featured on the cover of many prestigious scientific journals across various disciplines.  But the very first journal paper I ever wrote happened here in Hammond Building. That’s perhaps the biggest highlight for me in terms of my work. It launched me on a path that changed my focus completely and defined the road that I followed.

PS: What was its focus? 

SOTIROPOULOS: So I work in fluid mechanics. When you deal with jet engines or rockets, you deal with hot gases, and these things are compressible. Water, though, is incompressible—if you apply pressure to it, its volume doesn’t change. All fluid flows are described by a set of very complex mathematical equations, which cannot be solved analytically. They have to be solved with computers using numerical methods. So, my very first paper focused on presenting a new numerical method I developed for solving the equations describing the flow of incompressible fluids. Everything I have done since then in my career is using computer methods to simulate complex flows of incompressible fluids, like blood, water, even air, when air is at low speed.  

PS: Why and how did you transition to administration?

SOTIROPOULOS: I never started with that plan, to be in administration. But my time at Georgia Tech helped me realize that visionary administrative leaders can drive cultural change at an institution by infecting us with the relentless pursuit of academic excellence, driving us to really strive to do better, to reach higher. That was the first time I realized maybe there is something really exciting [in administration]. 

And then when I went to the University of Minnesota, I was a director of this very famous, world-renowned environmental field mechanics laboratory, so that was my [first] administrative role. A lot of it was research, but it was a soft-funded lab, so we had to raise a lot of money. I had to bring industry, other universities, other colleges within the university together. I kind of got infected by the passion for interdisciplinary research and team building. I got to see that this is fun, and I can have another type of impact in my work by bringing people together, inspiring them to do great things.

PS: In your last role at VCU, you helped to create the Academy of Interdisciplinary Innovation, which sounds like the kind of “future-ready education” you’ve talked about implementing here. Tell us about that. 

SOTIROPOULOS: This was an idea that originated from faculty at VCU. I started a strategic planning group called the One VCU Academic Repositioning Task Force, where I put together a big group of faculty, academic deans, staff, and I asked them to think of innovative ways to leverage our assets and create opportunities to meet the rapidly evolving needs of our students. I said it’s more than a college, so we should call it the Academy of Interdisciplinary Innovation, and it’s focused on educating innovative problem-solvers and aspiring entrepreneurs by focusing on three pillars.

Number one, interdisciplinary curricular design—bringing together curricular assets and ideas from multiple colleges to develop interdisciplinary degrees in emerging areas. The second was experiential learning, structuring opportunities for students to learn by working in teams across multiple disciplines and projects that are either faculty research defined by industry, or they are community-engaged. And the third piece was to really recognize that if we have students that are learning across disciplines, they work on projects, maybe they come up with good ideas ... so to have it continue where you go from learning to experiential learning to entrepreneurial ventures. Let’s think of our students not only getting jobs but creating jobs.

PS: How do you think Penn State can apply similar strategies to move toward greater innovation in our academic disciplines, research, and entrepreneurial output?

SOTIROPOULOS: Penn State is already leading in many of these areas. For instance, we have the Nittany AI Alliance that is doing exactly this; it gets industry to define projects for students to work on in teams. And there are similar initiatives happening in the College of Engineering, our Smeal College of Business, the College of Information Sciences and Technology, and many other places. Now, what we need to do is find a way to scale this up across the entire institution, to move much faster, because the goal is changing the way we educate our students to make them future-proof, to make sure they have lifelong learning skills.

Change is in the DNA of this institution. Penn State has figured out how to do this very well.

PS: Obviously, “future-ready education” has to start with a faculty that’s equipped with the tools and skills they need to lead their students into that future. This essentially means teaching on two fronts simultaneously. How do you see the university facilitating that? 

SOTIROPOULOS: I think higher education is going to change completely. [Right now] we deliver education in multiple ways. There’s the intellectual piece, and there’s the engagement of students in projects and capstones and research and so on. But I think technology and AI will enable some personalized learning that may impact the role of the faculty member. It’s not going to happen next year, but I’m talking about over the next five to 10 years. I see a future there, and a lot of it has already started happening. 

The New York Times had an article about a school called the Alpha School that was launched in Austin, Texas. What they are doing in the K–12 space, they use AI tutors to do the traditional lecturing, and [teachers] engage the students more in experiential learning. Why would students want to go to a major research university like Penn State? The value that they will be getting is having [an] experience to work in teams, to connect with industry, with employers, to reach out to communities, engage in faculty research. So the role of the faculty member I think is going to change.

And we’re working to identify investments we need to make to really support the faculty. I don’t want to scare anybody, that suddenly we’re going to have robots teaching our students. The faculty will be more engaged in helping them understand the material better. It’s going to unleash their educational creativity in ways that we could not imagine.

And also, because of the tools that the students have at their disposal right now, we have to recognize that we cannot keep testing the students the same way, giving them the same type of homework. We have to elevate. We have to challenge them at the higher level. That’s why I think the experiential learning will become much more important. We need to start teaching our students the skills they will need to succeed by challenging them to solve complex problems—problems for which we may not know the answers in advance.

PS: You’ve talked about wanting to lead in AI literacy, which is an area of interest and need for students, faculty, and staff as well. What’s the first concrete step you see Penn State taking toward achieving that goal? 

SOTIROPOULOS: Penn State is already moving very fast in the space of AI. Even before I came here, there is this AI Coordinating Council, which is a group of faculty and others across the institution thinking about taking the entire Penn State academic enterprise and moving it into the AI era. And I’m talking about not only curriculum innovations, but how we use AI in everything we do—how we use it in budgets, in admitting students, in teaching students. A lot of it is happening in multiple areas now; we need to bring it together and scale it across the entire institution. So the first thing I charged everybody with is that by next fall, every first-year Penn State student­—graduate, undergraduate, and transfer—becomes at some elementary level AI-literate. Everybody’s thinking right now of ways to repurpose things we’re already doing for our students [in order] to do this.

Number two, I have also charged all academic deans and chancellors to make sure that there is an AI component in every discipline. This is not about turning students into computer scientists. This is making sure students, in whatever discipline they choose to major in, understand the power of these tools and how they can use them in their disciplinary area to dramatically augment their productivity.

PS: How do you plan to help the faculty understand and utilize these evolving technological tools at the same time? It’s a big learning curve for many.

SOTIROPOULOS: We are working with the senior vice president for research [Andrew Read] to find ways to introduce and to upskill our faculty to use AI in research. And the president has charged me to move the whole execution forward. This is a moment of disruption. If we don’t change, we’re going to be left behind. But Penn State has an immense superpower, which is the collective intellectual power of the entire community. Some of the smartest people in the world are part of this university. There is nothing we cannot do.

PS: You’ve said that one of your initial areas of focus is interdisciplinary research and innovation. Do you have any personal experience with working across disciplines in your own research?  

SOTIROPOULOS: [Interdisciplinary research] has allowed us to make major contributions in just about any fluid area. I’ve worked with air, with water, with blood.
So when it comes to water, I’ve worked with developing computational tools to optimize and design hydropower plants and tidal energy devices, but also to be able to understand how water flows in rivers and streams, and try to simulate big flooding events to understand the impacts of climate change and the impact of extreme events to infrastructure. We can do simulations right now for a large river with all kinds of infrastructure, stream banks, bridges, and simulate a 500-year flooding event at high resolution. We can do simulations to optimize and design with the computer wind farms before they are built. And AI tools are dramatically increasing the predictive capabilities of such simulations.

I also did a lot of pioneering work on blood flow in the human body. [And] we have done work to simulate the effect of breathing during the COVID-19 pandemic to see how masks work, and so on. I have done a lot of work in biology to really understand how fluid forces have impacted the evolution of fish body shapes and swimming styles in nature.

PS: Do you miss the research? 

SOTIROPOULOS: I am very excited [by research]. I still have collaborations; I still publish a few papers a year. But I went from publishing 20 papers a year to now publishing two or three. It’s died down.

PS: You’re returning to Penn State just as the university is starting to streamline its statewide campus system. What would be a best-case scenario for this transition, and how do you see your role in it?

SOTIROPOULOS: I had the opportunity to go to Penn State Beaver, my first visit to a commonwealth campus, and what struck me is, these campuses really make a big difference [in their community]. So the first thing is to approach the closing of campuses with respect, care, and compassion for all these folks who have worked enormously to train students at their communities. That’s my first priority as a provost.

I want to lead a process where we connect University Park with the entire ecosystem to develop more impactful economic development opportunities, more impactful learning opportunities for all our students. I am energized as I work to visit every campus to meet with people and learn everything that is happening, to lead the effort of developing a consistent plan that sees our campuses in a very holistic and integrated way, [and] ultimately drive impact for our students and communities, and the commonwealth’s economy.

PS: There are concerns nationwide about a potential decline in students from other countries coming to American universities. Can you speak to the importance of international students here? 

SOTIROPOULOS: They are in many ways a major contributor to the innovation in this country. Obviously, I’m a little biased, because I came here as an international student. Our president came here as an international student. I think Penn State remains committed 100% to our international students. And I hope we see this at the broader level. Because the biggest mistake we can make is to isolate ourselves from the world.

PS: What can you tell us personally about your experience of studying “abroad” here at Penn State?  

SOTIROPOULOS: For me, having the opportunity to come to the U.S. was the opportunity of a lifetime. I could never in my wildest dreams achieve what I did in my career anywhere else. What coming to America gave me is to really be able to define and realize my version of the American dream.

The reason I came to Penn State, and the reason I have been a leader as a researcher in higher education, is because I want to give back to the country that gave me so much. And I know every international student—because we have welcomed them, because we have nurtured them, we have supported them—they feel that way.

PS: Broadly speaking, there is a fair amount of anxiety in higher education right now, given the current political climate related to funding, enrollment challenges, budgetary, and tuition concerns. 

SOTIROPOULOS: The public perception about higher ed is real, and it is reflected in polling numbers. A recent Gallup Poll showed that a significant percentage of the public thinks that higher ed, four-year degrees do not add as much value as they used to add. So we have to meet that moment. And at the same time, we have technology disrupting everything.

PS: What will it take for Penn State to navigate these challenges? 

SOTIROPOULOS: I think moving our curriculum to the future with the things that I mentioned is extremely important, to really communicate that we have value here. Also, a big piece will have to be that we need to stay connected with our students as alumni. Because we’re going to be the institution that continuously upskills and reskills them so they can continue to evolve throughout their career. I was really excited to see that the Penn State Alumni Association already has a course in AI that’s available for free [see sidebar, p. 56]. Most of our alumni today, and those who are already working, will have to face jobs that are yet to be invented in their careers, right? So we have to stay connected with them.

PS: How can our alumni help?

SOTIROPOULOS: I think it’s important to engage our vast alumni network to build more experiential learning opportunities for our students, to further the connectedness. And we have to be very clear that this is a place where we celebrate a diversity of viewpoints and a diversity of lived experiences. But also, this should be a place where people can feel that it’s a safe space to engage in difficult conversations and be civically prepared to be good citizens for our democracy.  

‘Accessible’ AI

A partnership between the Alumni Association and the College of Communications offers alumni a primer on artificial intelligence.

An online minicourse in generative AI, hosted by the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications in partnership with the Penn State Alumni Association, is now free to all alumni. “I created this course to give Penn State alumni an accessible, practical introduction to generative AI,” says course instructor Heather Shoenberger, associate professor of advertising in the college. “These tools are reshaping how we live and work, and we wanted our alumni to feel confident and inspired to use them responsibly and creatively in their respective fields.”

The three-part course, titled “Generative AI In Action: Practical Skills for Real-World Applications,” moves alumni “from curiosity to confidence” regarding the use of generative AI, Shoenberger says. It is segmented into three webinars, each about one hour, and slides for each session can be downloaded as well.

Originally offered as a benefit to Alumni Association members, the course is now available to all alumni. “This course reflects Penn State’s commitment to lifelong learning and leadership in emerging technologies,” says Shoenberger, whose research examines the impact of the evolving advertising and media landscape on consumers, as well as ways to make media content better, and healthier for consumer consumption. 

To access the course, visit alumni.psu.edu/courses.