Designing Data Centers of the Future
Professor Chen is the Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and a director of Rohsenow Kendall Laboratories. His research interests center on nanoscale transport and energy conversion phenomena, and their applications in energy storage, conversion, and utilization.
Departments:
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Research Laboratory:
MIT Pappalardo Micro/Nano Engineering Laboratory
MIT News articles:
The best semiconductor of them all?
A material’s insulating properties can be tuned at will
Getting more heat out of sunlight
Short bio:
Dr. Chen employs experimental, theoretical, and numerical tools to study fundamental thermal energy conversion and transport mechanisms at micro- and nanometer scales. He also applied the fundamental understandings to advance efficiency of different energy conversion technologies such as thermoelectric, photovoltaic, thermophotovoltaic, and thermo-ionic energy conversion.
Dr. Chen 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 also serves on the board of the Asian American Scholar Forum and as 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 the US National Academy of Science.