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
Guangxin Lv
Guangxin Lv is currently a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He received his B.S. in Physics from Kuang Yaming Honors School at Nanjing University in 2018. He earned his Ph.D. degree in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign under the supervision of Prof. David Cahill and Prof. Christopher Evans in 2022.
Rohith Mittapally is a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan under the supervision of Prof. Pramod Reddy and Prof. Edgar Meyhofer in 2021. While at U-M, he developed precision techniques for probing nanoscale energy conversion and calorimetry for small biological systems. He obtained his B. Tech and M. Tech (specialization in Energy technology) in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Madras. At MIT, he is working on understanding novel electromagnetic surface absorption at the water-vapor interface and its applications in energy-efficient desalination technologies.
Yaodong Tu is a postdoctoral associate in the NanoEngineering group at MIT. He received his PhD in mechanical engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University under the supervision of Prof. Ruzhu Wang in 2017. His research topic is advanced adsorption materials and adsorption heat transformation systems. His current work at MIT is to develop hydrogel-based adsorbents and thermochromic membranes for efficiently harvesting environmental energy.
Graduate Students
Abimbola joined the group in 2022.
James Zhang received his B.S. joint degree in Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University in 2019. Currently his research is focused on storing low-grade heat in electrochemical systems.
Visitors
Caterina Grossi received her B.S. joint degree in Energy Engineering from University of Rome Tor Vergata in 2021. She is currently performing her M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering at ETH Zurich. Her research at MIT will be part of her Master Thesis and is focused on radiation heat transfer.