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MNHMT 2024 > Program > Plenary Speakers

Plenary Speakers

Gang Chen

Monday Aug 5, 9:30am-10:20am

Gang Chen
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Presentation Title: Rethinking Evaporation

Biography: Gang Chen is the Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He served as the Department Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT from 2013 to 2018. He obtained his PhD degree from the Mechanical Engineering Department at UC Berkeley. He was a faculty member at Duke University and UCLA, before joining MIT in 2001. He received an NSF Young Investigator Award, an R&D 100 award, an ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award, an ASME Frank Kreith Award in Energy, a Nukiyama Memorial Award by the Japan Heat Transfer Society, a World Technology Network Award in Energy, an Eringen medal from the Society of Engineering Science, and the Capers and Marion McDonald Award for Excellences in Mentoring and Advising from MIT. He is a fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He serves on the board of the Asian American Scholar Forum (aasforum.org). He is an academician of Academy Sinica, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, and a member of US National Academy of Science.

 


 

Martyn Poliakoff

Monday Aug 5, 10:20am-11:10am

Martyn Poliakoff
School of Chemistry
University of Nottingham

Presentation Title: Supercriticality: From Blue Fluid to Green Chemistry

Abstract:This lecture describes how I became fascinated in supercritical fluids (SCFs), which are gases such as CO2, compressed until they are nearly as dense as liquids. SCFs display an unusual combination of some of the properties of gases and liquids. I explain how SCFs led me to work in Green Chemistry, developing cleaner, more sustainable ways of making chemicals and materials. I also show how chance played a big role in determining how things developed for me and led me to the interface of chemistry and engineering. I thank all of my students, co-workers, collaborators, technicians and collaborators, particularly Professor Mike George, for all of their help and support. I also thank all of the organisations that have funded my research.

Biography: Sir Martyn Poliakoff CBE FRS FREng is a Research Professor of Chemistry at the University of Nottingham where he has worked since 1979. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (2002), of the RSC (2002) and of the IChemE (2004). He was knighted by the then Prince Charles in 2015 for "Services to the Chemical Sciences". He was made Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (2011) and Honorary Fellow of the Chinese Chemical Society (2015). In 2012, He was elected a Fellow of the Academia Europaea and, in 2013, Associate Fellow of TWAS, the World Academy of Science, and Associate Member of the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences (2014), Honorary Fellow of the RSC (2015), Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2016) and Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (2017). He served as Foreign Secretary and Vice-President of the Royal Society (2011-16). In 2018, he was appointed Honorary Professor at Beijing University of Chemical Technology and was awarded the 2019 James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public by the American Chemical Society. He received an Dr hon causa from the New University of Lisbon (2019), and Honorary Doctorates from Newcastle University (2022) and Warwick University (2023). He was elected Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2023. His research interests are focused on supercritical fluids, continuous reactions and their applications to Green and sustainable Chemistry.. Since 2008, he and his colleagues have collaborated with videomaker Brady Haran to make chemistry videos for the YouTube channel Periodic Videos. In 2021, a Nottingham Tram was named in his honour!

 


 

Cristina Amon

Monday Aug 5, 1:40pm-2:30pm

Cristina Amon
Distinguished Professor and Dean Emerita
Applied Science and Engineering
University of Toronto

Presentation Title: Multiscale Thermal Management of Electric Vehicle Technologies from Nanoscales to Vehicle-level Cooling Systems

Abstract: Core electrification technologies in Electric Vehicles (EV) require developments in battery cells and packs, chargers, and electric motors along with their thermal management strategies to improve performance, longevity, reliability and safety. Leap improvements rely on novel thermal management approaches and packaging architectures, which can optimally control the thermo-electrochemical phenomena occurring inside the batteries to maximize performance, minimize degradation, mitigate thermal runaway risk, enable fast-charging protocols, and accelerate a seamless transition of degraded EV batteries into less-demanding second-life stationary systems.

This talk will briefly discuss current engineering challenges and opportunities on EV thermal management. It will focus on our research on multiscale hierarchical modelling and optimization approaches to overcome thermal challenges across multiple physical domains and length scales spanning up to seven orders of magnitude, from battery cell electrode nanoscales to EV-level thermal management systems. This talk will also describe our surrogate modeling methodology based on deep-learning and convolutional encoder-decoder skip neural network architectures for conjugate heat transfer and illustrate it for the analysis and optimization of EV battery thermal management cold plate systems.

Biography: Cristina Amon is University Professor, Alumni Distinguished Professor and Dean Emerita of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto (UofT). She is the Scientific Director of the UofT’s Electrification Hub and Director of the ATOMS Laboratory. Prior to joining UofT in 2006, she was the Raymond J. Lane Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute for Complex Engineered at Carnegie Mellon University. She has pioneered the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics and the development of multidisciplinary multiscale hierarchical modelling, concurrent design and optimization methodologies for thermo-fluid transport phenomena, with applications to renewable energy, biomedical devices, and thermal management of electronics and electric vehicles.

Professor Amon was appointed to the Order of Canada and inducted into the Canadian Academy of Engineering, Royal Society of Canada, Hispanic Engineer Hall of Fame, Spanish Royal Academy and National Academy of Engineering. She was recognized as one of Canada’s Most Influential Women in 2012, the Powerful Women Trailblazers & Trendsetters in 2019, and received the highest honor for Engineers in Canada (2020 Engineers Canada Gold Medal) and Ontario (2015 PEO Gold Medal) for outstanding engineering public service, technical excellence and professional leadership.

Cristina Amon is the founding chair of the Global Engineering Deans Council and has served in numerous editorial and technical conference roles, advisory and review boards in North America and abroad. She received her Mechanical Engineering degree from Simon Bolivar University in Venezuela, and her M.S. and Sc.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 


 

Xing Zhang

Tuesday Aug 6, 9:00am-9:45am

Xing Zhang
Key Laboratory for Thermal Science and Power Engineering of Ministry of Education
Department of Engineering Mechanics
Tsinghua University China

Presentation Title: Progress and Prospect of Nanoscale Thermal Measurements

Biography: Xing Zhang is the Director of the Institute of Engineering Thermophysics in the School of Aerospace Engineering at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. He received his Ph.D. degree from Tsinghua University in 1988 and worked as a Lecturer at Southeast University after his graduation. From 1990 to 2006, he worked as a Research Associate, an Assistant Professor and an Associate Professor at Kyushu University in Japan. He returned to Tsinghua University as a Professor in 2006. His current research interests include micro/nanoscale heat transfer, thermophysical properties of nanostructured materials, multiscale cooling technology for data centers, multidisciplinary optimization design for electronic devices and the efficient use of wind/solar/hydrogen energy sources etc. He has published over 400 refereed journals and conference publications, and delivered more than 60 Plenary, Keynote, and Invited Lectures at major technical Conferences and Institutions. He serves as the President of Asian Union of Thermal Science and Engineering (AUTSE). He received the Best Paper Award from the Heat Transfer Society of Japan in 2021 and 2008, the Thermal Engineering Award for International Activity from JSME in 2020, the Hartnett-Irvine Award from International Center for Heat and Mass Transfer (ICHMT) in 2019, the Natural Science Award (First Class) from the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China in 2018, the Significant Contribution Awards from the 10th Asian Thermophysical Properties Conference in 2013, and the National Natural Science Award (Second Class) from the State Council of the People's Republic of China in 2011.

 


 

Prof. Dr. Clivia. M Sotomayor Torres

Wednesday Aug 7, 9:00am-9:45am

Prof. Dr. Clivia M. Sotomayor Torres
Director General
International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory (INL)
Brage, Portugal

Plenary Title: Phonons in Ultrathin Membranes and Topological Waveguides

Biography: Prof. Dr. Clivia. M Sotomayor Torres was born in Arica, Chile, and obtained her PhD in Physics in 1984 from the University of Manchester, UK. She held tenured academic appointments at Saint Andrews and Glasgow universities in the UK, a C4 professorship at Wuppertal University in Germany, was a research professor at the National university of Ireland University College Cork (Tyndall National Institute). From 2007 to 2023 she was an ICREA research professor and group leader of the Phononic and Photonic Nanostructures group at the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology in Spain. Clivia received awards from the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Nuffield Foundation and an Amelia Earhart Fellowship from ZONTA International (USA). She carries out research in the science and engineering of phononic nanostructures, nanophotonics and thermal transport. She was a guest professor at the P. Sabatier Univ. Toulouse, at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden and the Mittlesten- Schied Guest Professor at the University of Wuppertal in Germany. She has supervised over 20 PhD theses and more than 60 postdoctoral researchers. She has published extensively and has been cited over 12 000 times. Clivia has been and is an active participant in European level research since 1989 and coordinated several projects. She has held several commissions of trust including membership of the Danish National Research Council board, vice-chair of the Scientific Board of the Silicon Austria Laboratory and co-Chair and Chair of the Advisory Group of the EU Future and Emerging Technologies. In 2020 she was elected to the Academia Europaea and since 2021 she is a holder of an ERC Advanced Grant carrying out research on phonons for information and communication Technologies. Since September 2023 she is the Director General of the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory (INL) in Brage, Portugal.