Thomas C. Katsouleas

Thomas C. Katsouleas is the current President of the University of Connecticut (UConn) and was named to the job in February of 2019. He started at UConn in August and presided over his first Board of Trustees meeting on August 21, 2019.

He is the 16th president of UConn and was 60 years old when he was named. Before the UConn presidency Katsouleas had served as provost at the University of Virginia since 2015. Prior to that, he was the dean of the engineering school at Duke.

Katsouleas earned his Ph.D. from UCLA in physics in 1984. He began his undergraduate education at Santa Monica Community College and received his bachelor’s degree from UCLA in 1979.

He taught at UCLA for seven years after receiving his doctorate, before going to the USC in 1991 as a professor and focused his research efforts on high-performance computing and plasma physics. In 1997, he was named a full professor. Katsouleas was vice provost for information services at USC and also was an associate dean of USC’s engineering school.

Katsouleas is a noted inventor and the Institute of Electrical Engineers (IEEE) presented him their Plasma Science Achievement Award in 2001. He is the author/co-author of more than 200 publications.

He started Duke’s Katsouleas NAE Grand Challenge Scholars Program in 2010, which challenges students to use their knowledge to work on challenges posed by the NAE, many with tie-ins to sustainability.