Jayanta Kapat Ph.D., is Pegasus Professor and Trustee Chair in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Central Florida, and the founding Director of Center for Advanced Turbomachinery and Energy Research (CATER). He obtained B.Tech. from IIT Kharagpur in India in 1984, MS from Arizona State University in 1988 and Sc.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991 – all in Mechanical Engineering. 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. With external support of more than $27M to his individual credit, mostly from NASA, Siemens Energy, DOE and Boeing, he has facilitated significant graduate- and undergraduate-level research, graduated 38 Ph.D., 70 MS and 17 undergraduate Thesis students, and published more than 350 papers in journals and conferences. He has also 14 patents issued. Four of his graduate students are faculty at Purdue University, University of California Irvine, Old Dominion University and Embry Riddle Aeronautical University. He was awarded the ASME IGTI Industrial Gas Turbine Technology Award in 2024, in recognition of his sustained personal creative scientific or technological contributions unique to electric power or mechanical drive industrial gas turbine technology.