Gang Chen is the Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering and the director of the MIT Pappalardo Micro/Nano Engineering Laboratory. His research interests center on nanoscale thermal transport and energy conversion phenomena and their applications in energy storage and conversion, thermal management, and water treatment and desalination. He has made important contributions to the understanding of heat transfer in nanostructures and exploited them to develop energy conversion, storage, and water technologies. Chen is fellows of the US National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Postdocs and visiting scholars
Dr. Xiaoteng Zhou is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He earned his Ph.D. degree at Max Planck Insititute for Polymer Research under the supervision of Prof. Hans-Jurgen Butt in 2023 and Master degree in Chemical Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2019.
Dr. Martijn Bindels is a Postdoctoral Associate specializing in heat and mass transfer. His work examines how evaporation can be used to advance water treatment and desalination. After his Bachelor's degree, he worked at Aquastill to increase the technology readiness level of membrane distillation, from lab-scale to pilot-scale. He then pursued his PhD at the University of Southern California under Prof. Amy Childress, where he developed modeling and analysis frameworks for membrane distillation. He now focuses on further improving evaporation processes at MIT..
Dr. Jian Chang is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under the supervision of Prof. Gang Chen. He received his Ph.D. degree from Stockholm University in 2023. His current research focuses on photothermal/photomolecular effects and nanofiber engineering..
Dr. Vijay Kumar is currently a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, specializing in heat and mass transfer. He received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from University of California Santa Barbara in 2026, under Prof. Yangying Zhu. His current research focuses on improving absorption-based refrigeration systems.
Dr. Sobin Alosious is currently a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT under the supervision of Prof. Gang Chen. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering jointly from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and Swinburne University of Technology in 2022. Prior to joining MIT, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Queensland and the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on nanoscale thermal transport, molecular simulations, and data-driven materials discovery, with his current work exploring the molecular mechanisms governing heat capacity and thermal conductivity in liquids.
Asst. Prof. Yuting Guo is currently a visiting scholar in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and an Assistant Professor at Kyoto University. She received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Tohoku University in 2021. Her research focuses on electrochemical devices and energy conversion, particularly interfacial reaction and transport mechanisms in solid oxide fuel and electrolysis cells, using molecular dynamics simulations and density functional theory calculations. Her current research at MIT focuses on the photomolecular effect.
Graduate Students
Abimbola earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Howard University in 2020 and 2021, respectively. He joined the Nanoengineering Lab in 2022, where his research focuses on visible-light-driven interfacial evaporation, solar energy harvesting and conversion, membrane distillation, and related applications.