Chris Dames’ research focuses on fundamental studies of thermal transport at the nanoscale and other challenging regimes. He earned his PhD from MIT in 2006 under Gang Chen, following a BS and MS (under Arun Majumdar) from UC Berkeley. He was previously an Assistant Professor at UC Riverside before joining UC Berkeley in 2011, and since 2013 he has also held a joint appointment at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in the Materials Science Division. PhD alumni from his research group have moved on to positions in academia, industry, and national labs. Prof. Dames’ recognitions include an NSF CAREER Award, DARPA Young Faculty Award, Viskanta Fellowship and heat transfer lectureship at Purdue University, and selection to the Faculty Leadership Academy at UC Berkeley. He has been serving as Chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley since July 2021.

Dr. Ruijiao Miao

Ruijiao Miao is a postdoctoral scholar working on tunable energy storage materials and thermal switches for thermal management applications. She received her PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan, where her doctoral research focused on tuning the charge transfer and thermoelectric properties in molecular junctions. From 2019 - 2021 she was also co-advised by Prof. Ravi Prasher at LBNL.

Dr. Qiye Zheng

Qiye Zheng is a postdoctoral scholar working on high-throughput optical thermal metrology for the characterization of porous materials in multiscale. Before joining the lab, he received his PhD in materials science and engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where his research is focused on the energy transport and structure properties relationship in thermal functional materials for heat dissipation and thermal regulation applications. He is co-advised by Ravi Prasher at LBNL.

Ashwath Bhat

Ashwath Bhat received his B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in 2021. In 2020 he interned in the Indoor Environment Group at LBNL where he worked with Dr. Spencer Dutton and Dr. Dre Helmns. His research is currently with the CHARM center at UC Berkeley.

Spencer Alliston

Spencer Alliston received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2019, where he worked on Steam Methane Reformation at the distributed scale. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering. His current research is supported by the ATP-Bio NSF Engineering Research Center, in which he focuses on characterization and phase tracking of amorphous and crystalline ice for the purpose of biological tissue preservation.

Mingxin Jia

Mingxin received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering with minors in Electrical Engineering and Civil Engineering from Columbia University in 2019. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley with the help of a Berkeley Graduate Fellowship. Prior to joining the group, Mingxin’s research focused on developing scalable and low-cost materials and devices for radiative cooling applications. Currently, his research focuses on developing energy-efficient water desalination technologies powered by solar energy. At UC Berkeley, he is co-advised by Professor Chris Dames and Professor Ravi Prasher.

Lei Tang

Lei Tang received his B.S. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Utah in 2017 and 2018, respectively. His past research mainly focused on investigating near-field thermal radiation-mediated photonic thermal diodes via both numerical and experimental approaches. Currently, his research focuses on studying polycrystalline ceramics for high power lasing gain media.

Jason Wu

Jason Wu received his M.S. and B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from University of Connecticut in 2015 and 2016 respectively. He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been selected as a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program fellow. He had been focused on low dimensional materials synthesis and its thermal and electrical transport characterization before joining UC Berkeley. His current research focuses on thermal transport characterization of ferroelectric materials. In his free time, Jason enjoys baking, cooking, and traveling.