Prof. Jayathi Y. Murthy received her Bachelor of Technology in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1979 and Ph.D. from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in 1984. She is currently the Department Chair of Mechanical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin and holds the Ernest Cockrell Jr. Memorial Chair in Engineering. Prof. Murthy is a Fellow of American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

Prof. Murthy has worked in both academia and industry, having spent over ten years at Fluent Inc., a leading computational fluid dynamics software company, before moving to Carnegie Mellon University in 1998 as Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. From 2001- 2011, she was a Professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering, Purdue University, and held the Robert V. Adams Chair from 2008 to 2011. She also serves as Director of PRISM, a National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) funded centre for Prediction of Reliability, Integrity and Survivability of Microsystems.

Prof. Murthy's research interests lie in the field of computational heat transfer and fluid mechanics, with an emphasis on the development of unstructured, solution-adaptive finite volume methods for industrial applications. More recently, her work has focused on analysis of micro scale heat transfer, particularly in emerging microelectronics applications. Prof. Murthy serves on the K-16 and K-20 committees of ASME.

Author of over 275 technical papers and reports Prof. Murthy has also authored, several book chapters on numerical methods, and has edited two volumes on heat transfer and CFD. She is an editor of the second edition of the Handbook of Numerical Heat Transfer, serves on the editorial boards of Numerical Heat Transfer and International Academic Excellence Journal of Thermal Sciences, and has served as an Associate Editor of the ASME Journal of Heat Transfer.

Prof. Murthy is the recipient of the IBM faculty partnership award 2003-2005, the 2004 Journal of Electronics Packaging Best Paper award, the 2009 ASME EPPD Woman Engineer of the Year award, the 2009 Purdue University Team Excellence award, and Purdue Acorn award for 2006-2011.

The Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur is conferred on Professor Jayathi Y. Murthy for her outstanding contribution towards developing powerful analysis tools and techniques for the industry and having played a transformative role in redefining the design process of fluid and thermal systems.