Title: Comming soon
Bio: Gang Chen is currently Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He attended Xiangfan No. 5 High School in China from 1978-1980. He received his bachelor and master degrees from the Power Engineering Department, Huazhong Institute of Technology (now Huazhong University of Science and Technology or HUST in short), China, in 1984 and 1987, respectively. He stayed at HUST as a lecturer from 1987-1989. In 1988, he was interviewed by Professor Chang-Lin Tien as a PhD candidate to receive a fellowship from the K.C. Wong Education Foundation in Hong Kong. He joined Professor Tien’s group first at UC Irvine in 1989 and then at UC Berkeley in 1990 when Professor Tien rejoined Berkeley as its Chancellor. He obtained his PhD degree from the Mechanical Engineering Department, UC Berkeley in 1993, under Tien’s supervision. He was an assistant professor at Duke University from 1993 to 1997, a tenured associate professor at University of California at Los Angeles, from 1997 to 2001. He joined MIT in 2001 as a tenured associate professor, and was promoted to full professor in 2004. He was named a Warren Faculty Scholar at Duke University (1996-1997), and he was the first holder of the Warren and Towneley Rohsenow Professorship at MIT (2006-2009) before assuming the Soderberg Professorship from MIT School of Engineering in 2009. He served as the Head of the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering from July 2013 to June 2018.
Chen’s research interests center on nanoscale transport and energy conversion phenomena, and their applications in energy storage, conversion, and utilization. He has made important contributions to the understanding of heat conduction in nanostructures beyond Fourier diffusion regime via both modeling and experimental studies. He and his collaborators invented ways to extract phonon mean free path distributions in solids by exploiting ballistic phonon transport processes and advanced first principles simulation tools to compute phonon thermal conductivity. His group, working with collaborators, discovered Anderson localization in heat conduction and phonon hydrodynamics in graphite. He and his collaborators exploited the unique nanoscale heat conduction physics to advance the field of thermoelectric materials and their applications in solar thermal and waste heat recovery. He and his collaborators also discovered a few materials with thermal conductivity just below diamond, including predicting and experimentally demonstrating that boron arsenide have simultaneously high electron and hole mobility in addition to experimentally proving its predicted high thermal conductivity. His group demonstrated that polymer nanofibers can be more thermally conductive than most metals, and explained mechanisms why additives to liquids might significantly improve their thermal conductivity. In addition to nanoscale heat conduction and thermal and thermoelectric materials, Chen’s group also advanced the field of thermal radiation, including developing a method to measure radiation heat transfer between two surfaces down to tens nanometer separations and experimental demonstration that radiative heat transfer at such small spacings can exceed the prediction of the Planck blackbody radiation law by three orders of magnitude, photon trapping in solar photovoltaic cells, solar thermal and solar interfacial steam generation. In 2021, he discovered photomolecular effect: direct cleavage of large water molecular clusters from water-vapor interface by visible light. By exploring micro/nanoscale transport phenomena, Chen’s group has advanced a wide range of technologies such as thermoelectric cooling and power generation, solar thermal and solar photovoltaics, desalination, and thermal interface materials. Two of Chen and his collaborators’ inventions were selected by Scientific American as one of the annual top ten world changing ideas: one on directional solvent extraction technology for desalination and waste water treatment (2012) and one on using batteries to convert thermal energy into electricity (2014). He and his collaborators’ work on cubic boron arsenide was selected by the Physics World as one of its top ten Breakthroughs of the Year in 2022. Chen authored a book entitled “Nanoscale Energy Transfer and Conversion: a parallel treatment of electrons, molecules, phonons, and photons” - the first textbook in the field and his lectures in videos are freely available online via the MIT Open Courseware program. He has published ~460 technical articles, 24 book chapters, and over 600 invited talks all over the world. Professor Chen has supervised ~90 MS and PhD students thesis and over 60 post-docs. More than 40 of his PhD students and post-docs are in academia. He is an inventor on ~50 granted and pending patents and co-founded two companies.
Title: Comming soon
Bio: Ravi Mahajan is an Intel Fellow responsible for Assembly and Packaging Technology Pathfinding for future silicon nodes. Ravi also represents Intel in academia through research advisory boards, conference leadership and participation in various student initiatives. He has led Pathfinding efforts to define Package Architectures, Technologies and Assembly Processes for multiple Intel silicon nodes including 90nm, 65nm, 45nm, 32nm, 22nm and 7nm silicon. Ravi joined Intel in 1992 after earning his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Lehigh University. He holds the original patents for silicon bridges that became the foundation for Intel’s EMIB technology. His early insights have led to high-performance, cost-effective cooling solutions for high-end microprocessors and the proliferation of photo-mechanics techniques for thermo-mechanical stress model validation. His contributions during his Intel career have earned him numerous industry honors, including the SRC’s 2015 Mahboob Khan Outstanding Industry Liaison Award, the 2016 THERMI Award from SEMITHERM, the 2016 Allan Kraus Thermal Management Medal & the 2018 InterPACK Achievement award from ASME, the 2019 “Outstanding Service and Leadership to the IEEE” Awards from IEEE Phoenix Section & Region 6 and most recently the 2020 Richard Chu ITherm Award and the 2020 ASME EPPD Excellence in Mechanics Award. He is one of the founding editors for the Intel Assembly and Test Technology Journal (IATTJ) and currently VP of Publications & Managing Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions of the CPMT. He has long been associated with ASME’s InterPACK conference and was Conference Co-Chair of the 2017 Conference. Ravi is a Fellow of two leading societies, ASME and IEEE. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2022 for contributions to advanced microelectronics packaging architectures and their thermal management.
Title: Comming soon
Bio: José N. Reyes, Ph.D., co-founded NuScale Power, LLC, co-designed the NuScale passively-cooled small nuclear reactor and has served as the company’s Chief Technology Officer since 2007. Dr. Reyes is an internationally recognized expert on passive safety system design, testing and operations for nuclear power plants. He has served as a United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency technical expert on passive safety systems, is a co-inventor on more than 180 patents granted or pending in 20 countries and has received several national awards including the 2013 Nuclear Energy Advocate Award, the 2014 American Nuclear Society Thermal Hydraulic Division Technical Achievement Award, the 2017 Nuclear Infrastructure Council Trailblazer Award, the 2021 American Nuclear Society Walter H. Zinn Medal, and 2021 inductee into the University of Maryland Innovators Hall of Fame.
Dr. Reyes is a fellow of the American Nuclear Society (ANS), a NURETH fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In the past, he has served as head of the Oregon State University (OSU) Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Health Physics, directed the Advanced Thermal Hydraulic Research Laboratory and was the Co-Director of the Battelle Energy Alliance Academic Center of Excellence for Thermal Fluids and Reactor Safety in support of the Idaho National Laboratory mission.
Dr. Reyes currently serves as a Professor Emeritus in OSU’s School of Nuclear Science and Engineering. He holds Ph.D. and Master of Science degrees in nuclear engineering from the University of Maryland and a Bachelor of Science degree in nuclear engineering from the University of Florida. He is the author of numerous journal articles and technical reports, and he has given lectures and keynote addresses to professional nuclear organizations in the United States, Europe and Asia. He is a licensed professional engineer in the state of Oregon.
