Jayanta Kapat

Jayanta Kapat is a Pegasus Professor and a Trustee Chair in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UCF. He obtained his Sc.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991. He joined UCF in 1997 as an Assistant Professor, and was promoted to the ranks of Associate Professor and Professor in 2001 and 2005, respectively. Since mid-2000’s, Dr. Kapat has fully focused his research activities on turbo-machineries and associated technologies for power generation, aviation, and space propulsion, and created partnerships with leading OEM’s in these industries. The most significant impact of his work stems from his vision for CATER. He brought 10 core faculty members with multidisciplinary capabilities together to solve some of the most complex research problems in turbomachinery for power generation, aviation and space propulsion. With research support of more than $20M for his individual research, mostly from NASA, DOE and Siemens Energy, Kapat has facilitated significant graduate- and undergraduate-level research, graduated 33 Ph.D., 61 MS and 17 BS Honors-in-Major (HIM) (Thesis) students, and published more than 350 papers in journals and conferences – mostly co-authored with his students. He has also 14 patents issued, and has established excellent success rates for job placement and internships of his students at all levels.