“Life is never linear. If a door is open to you, push through it — and you never know where it’ll take you.” USC Viterbi School of Engineering Dean Yannis C. Yortsos on one of his final trips to India as dean.
Long before he became the longest-serving dean in the history of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Yannis C. Yortsos was a young student in Greece who dreamed of studying abroad. As he and his friends prepared their applications for Master’s programs in the United States, they hit upon an ingenious plan. “My friends and I went to the Fulbright Office and got some maps and brochures,” Yortsos recalled. “We didn’t want to compete with each other for admissions, so we divided the U.S. into sectors.” He was assigned the West Coast — and that, as much as anything, is how a young engineer from Athens found his way to California, and eventually to USC.
“If a door is open to you, push through it — and you never know where it’ll take you.” Yannis Yortsos
It is a story Yortsos shared this month as he traveled to Mumbai and Bengaluru for one of his final visits to India as dean. After 21 years leading the school, he will step down at the end of June and return to the faculty. And the path that brought him there — full of turns he never saw coming — was the story he reflected on. “Life is never linear,” he says. “If a door is open to you, push through it — and you never know where it’ll take you.”
Dean Yortsos at the Mumbai Student Meet & Greet
“If Plato said this, maybe I should do that”
He delivered that message most directly to the people just beginning their own journeys. In Mumbai, USC Viterbi’s India Office organized a meet-and-greet for students admitted to the Fall 2026 incoming class — young engineers preparing to make the same leap across oceans, languages, and cultures that Yortsos once made. To them, he shared the genuinely surprising shape of his own career.
“When I started at USC as a professor, I didn’t want to do anything to do with administration. I loved my research,” he told them. “But I became a department chair — two departments joined, and they said, ‘Would you want to be the chair of this new joint department, because you have experience in both these areas?’ I said okay, I’ll do it. I did it for six years, and then I said, ‘I’m not going to do this again.’ And then a new dean came in and said, ‘Why don’t you come and help me in the dean’s office?’ I said, ‘Why should I do that?’ The answer was: Plato said you have to serve your country. So I said, if Plato said this, maybe I should do that. So I went there — and I ended up being the dean for 21 years!”
“Those of you who think you know exactly where you are going to go — life will surprise you.” Yannis Yortsos
He left them with a charge as much as a story. “USC will give you so many opportunities to do so many things,” he said. “Those of you who think you know exactly where you are going to go — life will surprise you. Follow your heart.” These, he added, “will be transformative times for your life. Don’t hesitate to take chances. Keep opening the doors that are open in front of you. You never know what is in store.”
Opening doors for the next generation
Yortsos held the door open for the next generation, too. At the two receptions, USC Viterbi announced the USC-India Yannis C. Yortsos Graduate Scholarship in Engineering, supporting two students from India pursuing graduate degrees at the school. For a dean who arrived in the United States as an international student himself, the gesture was deeply personal: a way of extending to others the same welcome that once changed the course of his own life. The scholarships are funded through the Golden Torch Education and Scholarship Foundation, a newly formed Section 8 Not-For-Profit supported by the contributions of USC Viterbi India Advisory Board members, alumni, and parents. Their announcement gave the celebrations a forward-looking spirit — a reminder that the Trojan Family in India is not only honoring its history, but actively investing in who comes next.
A warm welcome at a reception in Mumbai
A Trojan Family that spans two countries
The community celebrating Yortsos reflects just how deep USC’s roots in India run. Indian students now represent roughly 21 percent of USC’s international enrollment, with 2,136 students from India on campus in Fall 2025.
Those students are part of a school with a remarkable history of shaping the modern world. Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon, earned his master’s degree in aerospace engineering from USC in 1970. Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon, earned his master’s degree in aerospace engineering from USC in 1970. The Domain Name System — the technology behind the “.com,” “.edu,” and “.org” addresses that organize the entire internet — was invented in 1983 at USC’s Information Sciences Institute, part of USC Viterbi. And today, USC Viterbi researchers are teaching four-legged robots to walk across the kind of rugged terrain found on the moon, as part of a NASA-funded project preparing the next generation of planetary exploration.
That tradition continues in the AI era, carried forward by USC Viterbi’s Indian-origin graduates. Alumni Ashish Vaswani (PhD computer science, ’14) and Niki Parmar (master’s in computer science, ’15) — who first met at USC — went on to co-author “Attention Is All You Need,” the landmark 2017 paper that introduced the transformer architecture and laid the foundation for ChatGPT and the generative-AI systems that followed. The paper has since been cited tens of thousands of times, a reminder that the students arriving at USC today are joining a lineage of world-changing ideas.
A reception by the sea in Mumbai
In Mumbai, alumnus Sandeep Tandon — B.S. EE ’90, M.S. EE ’91 — opened his beachfront home in Juhu to host a reception in the dean’s honor. Tandon is one of India’s most recognizable technology entrepreneurs: the co-founder of Freecharge, among the country’s first mobile-payment platforms, which became India’s fastest-growing digital wallet before its landmark sale in 2015. Today, he leads the Tandon Group, guides publicly listed electronics maker Syrma SGS Technology and AI-driven health-tech firm Infinx, and backs a new generation of founders. Just six months ago, he received the USC Distinguished Alumni Award at the inaugural USC India Awards.
Among the guests was Madhuri Dixit Nene, the Bollywood icon and Padma Shri awardee who, with her husband, health-tech innovator and founder-investor Dr. Shriram Nene, belongs unmistakably to the Trojan Family. The couple are USC Viterbi parents twice over: their elder son, Arin Nene, graduated from USC Viterbi in 2025, and their younger son, Ryan Nene, is currently a student on track to graduate in 2027. Dr. Nene himself serves on the USC Viterbi India Advisory Board.
For many in attendance, the evening was a chance to close a circle. Most of the alumni present had first met Yortsos as students, in classrooms, office hours, and commencement lines, and had watched from afar as he transformed USC Viterbi into one of the nation’s premier engineering schools. Tandon framed the evening as a tribute to a leader who, over two decades, made India a genuine priority for the school. “Dean Yortsos made 18 trips to India,” Tandon noted — a remarkable cadence of presence that, he said, did more than any brochure ever could. “He is such a gracious person. He really built the USC brand.”
Yortsos with Sandeep Tandon.
Under Yortsos’s leadership, USC Viterbi grew into one of the nation’s premier engineering schools, with new named departments, new research buildings, and dozens of faculty elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He articulated a vision he called “Engineering+” — the idea that engineering is the enabling discipline of our time, empowering nearly every other field and, ultimately, helping to build a better world for all humanity. For that work, Yortsos and his colleagues received the National Academy of Engineering’s 2022 Gordon Prize for the Grand Challenges Scholars Program, now in nearly a hundred engineering schools worldwide, and in 2014 he was awarded the Ellis Island Medal of Honor for his contributions as a first-generation American.
“USC Viterbi means connections, friends, and long-lasting relationships to me.” Jigar Shah
The warmth in the room had a voice in Jigar Shah, vice president of global solutions at Yardi, who came to USC in 2000 and earned two master’s degrees there. For Shah, the school is shorthand for an entire network of belonging. “USC had a thriving and amazing community of Indians,” he said. “USC Viterbi means connections, friends, and long-lasting relationships to me. Everything I have in my career for 20-plus years, I have thanks to USC.” Before the celebration ended, the Trojan community presented Yortsos with a digital book of memories and tributes.
The reception was one of several gatherings that filled the dean’s days in Mumbai. The Nenes welcomed Yortsos for a private breakfast at their home, and a group of chemical engineering alumni and entrepreneurs gathered for a lunch hosted by Gautam Trivedi — a fitting tribute to a dean who began his own USC journey as a professor of chemical engineering.
Breakfast with the Nene family in Mumbai
A gathering of legends in Bengaluru
Two days later, in Bengaluru, it was Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw who played host. The founder and chairperson of Biocon Group — India’s largest innovation-led biopharmaceutical company — Mazumdar-Shaw is a longtime member of the USC Viterbi India Advisory Board and was honored with the USC Business Management Award at December’s inaugural USC India Awards.
The evening drew Trojans flying in from across India. That morning, N.R. Narayana Murthy — the founder of Infosys and a supporter and advisor to USC Viterbi for more than two decades — joined Yortsos for a two-hour breakfast. Murthy received the inaugural USC–Ratan Tata Award at that same December ceremony.
The mood mirrored Mumbai’s: equal parts celebration and affection for a leader many credited with shaping not only their education, but their sense of what was possible.
With Kiran Mazumdar Shaw at the Bengaluru Reception
A school built for what comes next
Yortsos leaves USC Viterbi at an inflection point of his own making. In 2024, he helped establish the School of Advanced Computing within USC Viterbi to advance digital fluency and AI across every engineering discipline. In May 2026, USC Trustee Mark Stevens and his wife, Mary, made a landmark $200 million gift to the effort, and the school was renamed the USC Mark and Mary Stevens School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence — a milestone the school counts among its proudest, and a clear signal of where USC intends to lead in the age of AI. Gaurav Sukhatme, the school’s inaugural director, will step in as interim dean of USC Viterbi on July 1.
For the alumni who gathered to honor him, the truest measure of Yortsos’s tenure was never a building or a ranking. It was the open doors. It was the chance offered to students who simply needed someone to believe they belonged — students not unlike a young engineer from Athens, once assigned the West Coast by the luck of a friendly draw. Many of them filled the room that evening, a world away from where they began. They had pushed through the doors he held open. And they had come back to thank him for it.
Published on June 30th, 2026
Last updated on June 30th, 2026