SPEAKER
Dr. Bidzina Kekelia
Senior Research Engineer
NREL
Bidzina Kekelia's professional experience in engineering spans over 30 years and he has large number of publications on thermal management and clean energy technologies. Currently he is a Senior Research Engineer in the Advanced Power Electronics and Electric Machines (APEEM) Group within the Center of Integrated Mobility Sciences at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Since joining NREL in 2015, Bidzina's research efforts are focused on vehicle thermal management, exploring novel cooling methods for power electronics, and traction drives for ground electric vehicles (EV) and electrified aviation. Before coming to NREL, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Utah, working on development of a thermal battery prototype for cabin climate control in electric vehicles.
Bidzina has also worked in the power generation and energy sector. Under the auspices of the U.S. Agency for International Development, he provided technical expertise and advisory support to the Ministry of Energy of Georgia. Bidzina developed a power generation dispatch optimization model to identify the export capacity of existing and proposed electricity production facilities in the country, prepared pre-feasibility techno-economic studies for attracting funding to major power sector projects, including high-voltage transmission line, hydropower plants, and provided consulting services and engineering oversight on several power sector-related rehabilitation projects.
Bidzina earned his Bachelor's (Hons) in Mechanical Engineering from Georgian Technical University (1992), M.S. in Renewable Energy (Solar Thermal & PV) from the University of Oldenburg (1999) and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Utah (2012).
SPEAKER
Dr. Solomon Adera
Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering
University of Michigan
Dr. Solomon Adera is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Michigan. He received his MS and PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012 and 2016, respectively. From 2016-2019, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. His research interests include fundamental studies of micro/nanoscale heat and mass transfer, thermal management, fog/water harvesting, and solar-thermal energy systems. Solomon was the recipient of the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program from 2010-2013.
SPEAKER
Dr. Prabhakar Subrahmanyam
Technical Lead & Sr. Staff Thermal Architect
Intel Corporation
Dr. Prabhakar Subrahmanyam is a Senior Technical Lead and Senior Staff Principal Thermal Engineer at Intel, renowned for his expertise in thermal management from devices to data centers. He specializes in cooling at the silicon and package levels for post-silicon validation and broader strategies across the silicon chip ecosystem, including client, desktop, server, and AI silicon. Notably, he served as the chief validation thermal architect for the Ponte Vecchio chip, Intel's first exascale GPU chip, which powers the Aurora supercomputer at the U.S. Argonne National Laboratory.
Dr. Prabhakar holds a PhD and Masters in Aerospace Engineering, with a focus on reentry heat transfer, as well as a first Masters in Computer Science and a Bachelors degree in Physics. He has authored over 60 papers and holds more than 50 patents in thermal management. His contributions have earned him 5 AIAA Best Paper Awards, 3 IEEE Best Paper Awards, and a gold medal for the best thesis.
In addition to his work at Intel, Dr. Prabhakar is a Visiting Professor at SRM University in India, where he established a lab for electronic cooling and teaches a Capstone program in Electronic Cooling, pioneering an industry internship within the classroom environment for undergraduate students.