Stephen Pope is the Sibley College Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Sibley School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University. He received his undergraduate and graduate education in the Mechanical Engineering Department of Imperial College, London. Following post-doctoral positions at Imperial College and in Applied Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology, he joined the Mechanical Engineering faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978, and then moved to Cornell in 1982.

His research is in the areas of modeling and simulation of turbulent flows and turbulent combustion. He pioneered the use of probability density function (PDF) models for turbulent reactive flows, and has made various contributions to the statistical modeling of turbulent flows, and to their study via direct numerical simulations and large-eddy simulations. For combustion chemistry, he has developed a number of dimension-reduction and tabulation methodologies. His textbook "Turbulent Flows" was published in 2000.

Steve Pope is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the recipient of the Zeldovich Gold Medal of the Combustion Institute (2008), and the Fluid Dynamics Prize of the American Physical Society (2009).