Katepalli R. Sreenivasan, a world renowned experimental physicist who was born in India and is now a citizen of the United States, has been appointed ICTP director. Walter Erdelen, UNESCO assistant director general for natural sciences, made the announcement at the ICTP Scientific Council meeting in Trieste, on 4 November. Sreenivasan, whose major fields of interest are fluid dynamics and turbulence, is currently professor of physics and mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland in the United States, where he also directs the Institute for Physical Science and Technology. He earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees in India, at the University of Bangalore and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, where he was awarded a doctorate in aerospace engineering in 1975. Following two years of post doctoral study in Sydney and Newcastle, Australia, he travelled to the United States to serve as a researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and then at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, where he was the Harold W. Cheel professor of mechanical engineering and professor of physics, applied physics and mathematics. He moved to the University of Maryland last January. Sreenivasan has numerous publications to his credit in such fields as turbulence, complex fluids, combustion, cryogenic helium and nonlinear dynamics. He is scheduled to begin his tenure at ICTP in March.