Eva Kanso

Eva Adnan Kanso is a Lebanese-American mechanical engineer who studies locomotion in fluids: the behavior of fish, the ways that cilia can move liquid and move small organisms through liquid, the ways that the motion of water can be used to sense moving objects, and the replication of similar behavior by robots and in computer animation. She is a professor and Zohrab A. Kaprielian Fellow in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at the University of Southern California, and a program director at the National Science Foundation.

Education and career Kanso graduated in 1997 from the American University of Beirut with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. She went to the University of California, Berkeley for graduate study, earning a master's degree in mechanical engineering in 1999, a second master's degree in mathematics in 2002, and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering in 2003. Her doctoral dissertation, Impact of a Pseudo-Ball on a Rigid Foundation, was jointly supervised by Panayiotis Papadopoulos and Andrew J. Szeri.

After postdoctoral and visiting positions at the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, and California Institute of Technology, she joined the University of Southern California as an assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering in 2005.

Recognition In 2014 the American University of Beirut gave Kanso their Distinguished Young Alumnus Award.

She was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2022, after a nomination from the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics, "for penetrating and insightful investigations of problems in biological aquatic and aerial locomotion, ciliary transport, swarms and schooling, and many other topics, that deftly blend elegant theoretical models and physical experiments".