Sunil Kumar

Vice Provost of Graduate and Postdoctoral Programs Global Professor of Engineering - New York University Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Biography

Sunil Kumar is the vice provost of graduate and postdoctoral programs at New York University Abu Dhabi and a Global Professor of Engineering at New York University, with concurrent appointments in Abu Dhabi and New York. He is a mechanical engineer whose scholarly research focuses on the transport of light and thermal radiation, specifically interaction of lasers with surfaces and scattering media, optical phenomena and devices, fire dynamics, thermal-fluid analysis, and applied mathematics. He was the Dean of Engineering at NYU Abu Dhabi from 2009 to 2015, and previously was graduate dean and associate provost, and former head of the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Manufacturing Engineering at New York University, Tandon School of Engineering. He taught at the University of California Berkeley, was a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and a visiting scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center. Kumar is the research leader for NYU’s Fire Research efforts, including the Advanced Learning Through Integrated Visual Environments (ALIVE) project, which educates, trains, and disseminates critical information to both career and volunteer firefighters via a unique game-based computer program. Kumar holds a B.Tech. from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur; an MSc and MA from the State University of New York, Buffalo; and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Kumar is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.