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
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..
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Zizhao (Will) Wang is currently a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He received his PhD in Applied Physics from Harvard University under the supervision of Prof. Frans Spaepen and Prof. David Weitz in 2025. He received his B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2018, where he was enrolled in the Zhiyuan Honors Program..
Graduate Students
Abimbola joined the group in 2022.