UMass Board of Trustees Approves MIE’s Jonathan Rothstein as Distinguished Professor

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In June the UMass Board of Trustees promoted Jonathan Rothstein – a professor in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department – to the prestigious status of Distinguished Professor. Among many other notable awards, Rothstein has received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Program Award, a Society of Rheology (SoR) Outstanding Service Award, and the top faculty awards given by the College of Engineering (CoE). 

Rothstein has published more than 120 papers in archival scientific journals, given more than 40 invited lectures and 300 conference presentations, and has received approximately 25 research grants.

Among other criteria, the qualifications for a UMass Distinguished Professor include: outstanding research, teaching, and/or public-service contributions that are widely recognized nationally and/or internationally; extraordinary level of productivity and impact in his/her field of study that goes well beyond the existing high expectations for full professors on campus; a level of productivity and impact that has been demonstrated for an extended period of time; pre-eminence in his/her field of study; and recognition by professional organizations for outstanding contributions to the field (e.g., receipt of national awards). 

Rothstein heads the Non-Newtonian Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, which studies experimental fluid dynamics with a focus on non-Newtonian fluid dynamics and rheology.

Among other areas, his research has made a significant impact in the fields of non-Newtonian fluid dynamics, shear and extensional rheology, elastic-flow instabilities, Marangoni flows, superhydrophobic surfaces, turbulent and laminar drag reduction, microfluidics, dynamics of wormlike micelle solutions, and polymer processing.

Rothstein received his Bachelors in Engineering degree from the Cooper Union in 1996 and completed his M.S. at Harvard University in 1998 and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Mechanical Engineering in 2001. He joined the UMass Amherst MIE department in 2001 and later was a visiting faculty member at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium in the Department of Chemical Engineering in 2007-2008 and again in 2015. 

The CoE recognized Rothstein with its Goldstein Outstanding Junior Faculty Award in 2007, Outstanding Teaching Award in 2015, and Outstanding Senior Faculty Award in 2020. In addition, he was the first recipient of the Metzner Early Career Award in 2007 from the SoR, won the SoR Outstanding Service Award in 2019, and is currently serving as the SoR president.

Rothstein has also received many other prestigious awards, including the Frenkiel Award from the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics in 2002 and a 3M Non-tenured Faculty Award in 2003. 

Rothstein has developed a series of outreach activities, based on the field of rheology, that contain a number of demonstrations and hands-on activities focused on middle-school to early-high-school students. The aim of these activities is to expose a larger number of students to a wide array of fascinating STEM topics and hopefully empower students from all walks of life to enter STEM fields. 

In addition, Rothstein is the proprietor and founder of Jonathan P. Rothstein and Associates, a scientific consulting company with a broad and diverse client base. He also co-founded Marvel Diagnostics, a start-up company which used technology developed in his and his co-founder’s labs to develop a breathalyzer test for detecting Covid during the height of the pandemic. (July 2025)