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Ravi Prasher is the Chief Technology Officer of Bloom Energy. He also serves as an adjunct professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley. Prior to joining Bloom Energy, Ravi was the Associate Lab Director of Energy Technology Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). His responsibilities included managing research and development in a wide variety of areas, including fuel cells, hydrogen production, storage and transport, electrochemical and thermal storage, carbon capture, microgrids, and renewable energy among others. He was also a Senior Scientist at LBNL where he conducted research in thermal science and engineering. Ravi’s experience includes being one of the first program directors at US DOE’s high-risk high-reward funding agency, ARPA-E, and serving as the technology development manager of Intel’s thermal management group. Ravi has published 150+ archival papers in top science and engineering journals and holds more than 35 patents. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of ASME. Ravi obtained his B.Tech. from IIT Delhi and PhD from Arizona State University.

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Dr. Vish Prasad, currently Professor of Mechanical and Energy Engineering at University of North Texas, is an internationally-renowned researcher and academic leader. His research has focused on convective heat transfer, heat transfer in porous media, energy materials and devices, advanced materials processing and manufacturing, microelectronics, and computational methods. Dr. Prasad has published over two hundred fifteen invited and/or refereed articles, made over one hundred conference presentations, and organized numerous conferences, symposia, and workshops. He serves (or has served) on many Editorial Advisory Boards as well as an Editor or Co-editor of several archival journals, monographs, annual reviews, and a hand book on crystal growth. He has been a consultant to many companies, has four patents to his credit, and currently serves as an advisor to a major engineering publishing house. As a PI/ Co-PI, Dr. Prasad has received over $25 million in grants and contracts from federal agencies and industry. And, over the years, he has mentored/advised sixteen doctoral students, twelve post-doctoral fellows, six visiting scientists, and numerous masters and undergraduate students.

In the academic leadership role, Dr. Prasad has served as the President of Mody University of Science and Technology (Rajasthan, India, 2/2014-8/2015), Vice President for Research and Economic Development of University of North Texas (2007-2012), Executive Dean/Dean of the College of Engineering and Computing at Florida International University (FIU, 2001-2007), Interim Dean of Engineering at Wichita State University (2013), and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Stony Brook University (1997-2001). His academic positions include Assistant Professor and Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Columbia University (1984-1993), Professor and Leading Professor of Mechanical Engineering (1993-2001) as well as Professor of Materials Science and Engineering (joint appointment, 1997-2001) at Stony Brook, and Distinguished Professor of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at FIU (2001-2007).

Dr. Prasad has received 2020 Heat Transfer Memorial Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 2011 Michael P. Malone International Leadership Award from the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU), 2010 Award for building Texas-India Educational Partnership from the Greater Dallas Indo-American Chambers of Commerce, 2006 Academic Excellence Medal from the Latin American and Caribbean Consortium of Engineering Institutions for contributions to engineering education in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 2005 Distinguished Service Medal for Engineering Education in Latin America from Santa Maria University. He has also received 2007 Educator of the Year Award for contributions to engineering education to Hispanics, from HENAAC (now known as “Great Minds in STEM”) – a national organization that honors Hispanic leaders in engineering and business and 2006 ABET President’s Diversity Award on behalf of the FIU College of Engineering and Computing from the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET). Dr. Prasad is the Founding President of Latin American and Caribbean Consortium of Engineering Institutions (LACCEI) and Co-founder of Mattoo Center for India Studies at Stony Brook. Dr. Prasad is an elected Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineer (ASME). In the past, he has served as the Chair of several ASME Heat Transfer Division Committees and a member of the USRA Microgravity Research Council for a major NASA Program. Dr. Prasad received his B.S. from National Institute of Technology, Patna (India), M. Tech. from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and Ph.D. from University of Delaware, all in mechanical engineering.

The perpetual advancement in computational capabilities, coupled with the continuous evolution of software tools and numerical algorithms, is creating novel avenues for research, exploration, and application at the nexus of computational fluid and structural mechanics. Fish leverage their remarkably flexible bodies and fins to harness energy from vortices, propelling themselves with an elegance and efficiency that captivates engineers. Bats fly with unparalleled agility and speed by using their flexible membrane wings. Wave-assisted propulsion (WAP) systems, utilizing elastically mounted hydrofoils, convert wave energy into thrust. Each of these problems involve a complex and elegant interplay between fluid dynamics and structural mechanics. Historically, investigations into such phenomena were constrained by available tools, but modern computational advancements now facilitate exploration of these multi-physics challenges with an unprecedented level of fidelity, precision, and realism. In my presentation, I will discuss projects that harness the capabilities of high-fidelity sharp-interface immersed boundary methods to address a spectrum of challenging problems in engineering and biology  involving fluid-structure interaction.

Rajat Mittal is a fluid dynamicist and a professor of mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) with a secondary appointment in the School of Medicine. Mittal earned his bachelor’s degree in Aeronautical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, in 1989. He then pursued a MS in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Florida, graduating in 1991, followed by a Ph.D. in Applied Mechanics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1995. Mittal’s academic journey includes postdoctoral research at the Center for Turbulence Research at Stanford University from 1995-1996, where he focused on large-eddy simulation. He began his teaching career at the University of Florida’s in 1996 and from 2001 to 2009, he was a faculty member at George Washington University. Since 2009, he has been a professor at Johns Hopkins University. Mittal is recognized for his seminal contributions in immersed boundary methods and their applications in fluid flow problems. His research group focuses on computational fluid dynamics, vortex dominated flows, biofluid mechanics, bioinspired engineering, and flow control. His research has made significant impact in fluid-structure interaction, cardiology, bio-locomotion, bioacoustics, COVID biophysics, gastric digestion, active flow control, and turbulent flows. He is the recipient of the 1996 Francois Frenkiel and the 2022 Stanley Corrsin Awards from the Division of Fluid Dynamics of the American Physical Society (APS), and the 2006 Lewis Moody as well as 2021 Freeman Scholar Awards from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). He is a Fellow of ASME and the APS, and an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He is an associate editor of several journals including the Journal of Computational Physics and Physics of Fluids.

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Dr. Guangdong Zhu has been a senior researcher since 2010 and, lately, the group manager of Thermal Energy Systems, at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The Thermal Energy Systems group is focused on concentrating solar power technologies, thermal energy storage and renewable energy hybridization. At NREL, Guangdong has been leading research efforts related to solar collector development, linear Fresnel technology, seasonal storage, and renewable energy hybridization. He is the executive director of the newly formed 5-year $25M heliostat consortium co-led by NREL and Sandia National Labs, partnering with Australian Solar Thermal Research Institute (ASTRI). He is the associate editor of the ASME Solar Energy Engineering since 2023 and was the ASME Journal of Energy Resources Technology between 2019 - 2022. He has served as technical/general program chair for ASME Energy Sustainability international conference in 2017 - 2020. He won NREL’s staff award for outstanding performance in 2021, President’s award in 2016 and Outstanding New Partnership Award in 2016. He has published over 40 peer-reviewed journal/conference papers and given invited presentations at various research institutes. Dr. Zhu obtained his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of New Mexico in 2006.

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Ali Beskok received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Türkiye in 1988. He received an MS degree in Mechanical Engineering from Indiana University Purdue University in Indianapolis in 1991, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in 1994 and 1996, respectively. Beskok was a Visiting Scholar at Brown University, Center for Fluid Mechanics from 1994 to 1996, and a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Research Laboratory of Electronics from 1996-1998. He joined Texas A&M University Mechanical Engineering Department as an Assistant Professor in 1998 and became an Associate Professor in 2004. In 2007, he moved to Old Dominion University as the Batten Endowed Chair Professor of Computational Engineering. In 2013, he moved to Southern Methodist University as the chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department and served at this capacity until June 2019. 

Beskok’s research focuses on theory, numerical simulations, and experiments on biophysics, micro- and nano-scale transport phenomena, multiphase flow heat and mass transfer, electrokinetic transport, and dielectric spectroscopy-based detection and characterization techniques. He is the co-author of the first book on simulations of micro- and nano-flows entitled Microflows and Nanoflows: Fundamentals and Simulation, Springer, New York, 2005.

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Prof. Eric Loth serves as the Rolls-Royce Commonwealth Professor of Engineering. He has received honors and awards from NASA and the National Science Foundation while also being named a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and of Cambridge University.  Dr. Loth has given invited talks at Cambridge, Penn, Princeton, Oxford, Harvard, and MIT.  In 2017, his project team was invited to US Congress to discuss their new the $3.7M project on extreme-scale morphing wind turbines.  This ambitious project has received coverage by NBC, Scientific American, Popular Science, Yahoo and MIT Technology Review.

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Dr. Preston received his B.S. (2012) in mechanical engineering from the University of Alabama. He obtained his M.S. (2014) and Ph.D. (2017) in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, under the guidance of Prof. Evelyn N. Wang. Following his graduate work, he trained as a postdoctoral fellow (2017-2019) at Harvard University in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, advised by Prof. George M. Whitesides.

He is a recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the Tau Beta Pi Fellowship, and the Wunsch Foundation Silent Hoist and Crane Award for Outstanding Graduate Research. At the University of Alabama, Dan participated in the Randall Research Scholars Program and the Alabama Industrial Assessment Center.  At MIT, he founded the Lab Energy Assessment Center (LEAC).

This presentation focuses on cities – a nexus of climate, energy, and air quality. The well-known Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect is the result of surface energy balance changes and anthropogenic heat emissions, largely from buildings, which forms a two-way feedback. In warm seasons, excess heat from the UHI is a major driver of tropospheric ozone production once combined with nitrogen emissions, from transportation or industry, and with volatile organic compounds, from vegetation. Building exhalations are also a major source of environmental emissions, via their ventilation systems. These systems emit Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC) and Volatile Compound products (VPC), which are suspected to be major contributors for ozone production. As such, there is direct positive feedback in warm seasons between extreme heat, energy demands, and sources for ozone production. In cold seasons, this nexus also prevails; cold climates motivate energy demands, which leads to pollutants from the gas or coal driven building heating systems, enhancing the UHI which results in negative feedbacks. We present a unified observation and modeling approach to investigate this nexus in the two end-use cases of New York City and Houston. Observations and modelling from two major summer field campaigns are used to explore ozone episode cases driven by heat waves. The modeling used an urbanized weather model, which incorporates a building energy model, and is coupled to a chemical physical model, referred as a whole as uWRF-Chem. The modeling framework was validated against the wide range of field observations, including satellite and surface stations, and demonstrated that incorporating urban effects is indeed necessary for accurate prediction of meteorological-chemical events. Observations showed a complex spatial and temporal interaction between the surface meteorology, UHI, sea-breeze front, and the ozone peak ridge. Results showed maximum ozone production takes place in the cities. Resulting high concentrations are advected to the urban outskirts, where the sea-breeze collapses and led to ozone peaks. Total energy for the city reached seasonal peaks during these events as well. Building energy use was found to be a key contributor to both UHI intensification and maximum ozone production directly and indirectly. Finally, we explore implications of this nexus in changing in future winters, as cities develop plans towards full electrification of the building sector. 

Prof. González-Cruz is the SUNY Empire Innovation Professor at the University of Albany of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, lead scientist of the Coastal-Urban Environmental Research Group (CUERG). Prof. González-Cruz earned his Doctorate (1994) and Bachelor (1988) degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and from the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, respectively. He teaches and conducts research in urban energy sustainability and resiliency, urban weather and climate, and regional climate modeling and analysis. Professor González-Cruz holds several patents in solar energy equipment, solar desalination systems, aerosol detection, and energy forecasting for buildings, and was recognized as a prominent young researcher by the National Science Foundation with a prestigious CAREER Award. He has authored or co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications, has delivered 100s of conference presentations, and his research has attracted more than $50M in external funding. He is a Fellow Member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME), and Former Vice-Chairman of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) Board on the Urban Environment. He is the 2025 recipient of the AMS Helmut E. Landsberg Award for Outstanding Contributions to Urban Climate. He was appointed in 2015 by the Mayor of the City as Member of the Climate Change Panel for City of New York, and more recently named Senior Scientist of Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Member of the US Department of Energy Office of Science Scientific Advisory Committee. He is the co-editor of the ASME Handbook of Integrated and Sustainable Buildings Equipment and Systems, and was named in 2019 as the Founding Editor of the newest ASME Journal of Engineering for Sustainable Buildings and Cities. 

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Dr. Zhiting Tian directs the ZT Research Group, specializing in both computational modeling and experimental characterization of energy transport. She joined the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering on July 1, 2018, with the added title of Eugene A. Leinroth Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow. Between 2014 and 2018, she was an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech.

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Professor Michael Keidar's Micropropulsion and Nanotechnology Lab conducts advanced fundamental and applied research in plasma medicine, micropropulsion for micro and nanosatellites, and plasma nanoscience and nanotechnology. Current projects include a cold plasma application for wound healing; cold plasma cancer therapy; the synthesis of single-wall carbon nanotubes with controlled conductivity; the synthesis of graphene with controlled numbers of layers; and the manufacturing of ultracapacitor devices based on nanotubes and graphene, micro-cathode thrusters for nano satellites, and multi-scale plasma simulations.

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Professor Lijie Grace Zhang's Bioengineering Laboratory for Nanomedicine and Tissue Engineering applies a range of interdisciplinary technologies and approaches in 3D/4D bioprinting, nanotechnology, tissue engineering, and drug delivery for various biomedical applications. The main ongoing research projects include: developing advanced 3D/4D bioprinting techniques and designing biologically inspired nanostructured scaffolds for complex cardiovascular, neural and musculoskeletal tissue regenerations; investigation of the influence of nano and chemical environments in directing stem cell differentiations for regenerative medicine; developing sustained drug formulations for long term and controlled drug release at disease or cancer sites; developing a novel 3D tunable tissue model for cancer metastasis study; and 4D printing soft biorobotics for biomedical applications. 

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Professor Carey is widely recognized for his research on near-interface micro- and nanoscale thermophysics and transport in liquid-vapor systems, and computational modeling and simulation of energy conversion and transport processes.  His research has frequently included modeling at multiple scales, ranging from the molecular level (molecular dynamics simulation of thermophysics) to the device and system level (multidevice system models).  His research is also exploring the use of machine learning strategies to enhance performance of energy conversion and transport in applications, and create energy technologies that can autonomously adapt to maximize their performance and reduce their environmental impact.

Since joining the Berkeley faculty in 1982, Professor Carey’s research has spanned a variety of applications areas, including high performance solar thermal power systems, building and vehicle air conditioning, smelting and casting of aluminum, phase change thermal energy storage, heat pipes for aerospace applications, high heat flux cooling of electronics, data center thermal management, and energy efficiency of digital information systems.  His research has contributed to developing advanced heat rejection technologies for electronics cooling, building AC systems, and power plants, and he has developed performance models for Tesla turbine expanders for green energy conversion technologies and thermionic power generation technologies for space applications.

Carey’s current research emphasizes development of strategies to use machine learning tools to better understand and model flame spread processes in electronic systems and the physics of boiling heat transfer at surfaces covered with hydrophilic nanostructured coatings.  This includes exploring innovative ways to combine advanced instrumentation data and machine learning image analysis to understand the physics of boiling processes.   He is also using machine learning tools to enhance performance modeling of energy conversion devices, and developing machine-learning-based adaptive energy conversion systems that can autonomously adjust their operation to simultaneously maximize energy efficiency and meet operating requirements for the application of interest.

Carey is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and he has also served as the Chair of the Heat Transfer Division of ASME.  Carey received the James Harry Potter Gold Medal in 2004 for his eminent achievement in thermodynamics, and the Heat Transfer Memorial Award in the Science category (2007) from the ASME.  Carey is also a three-time recipient of the Hewlett Packard Research Innovation Award for his research on electronics thermal management and energy efficiency (2008, 2009, and 2010), and he received the 2014 Thermophysics Award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

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