Gang Chen (engineer)


Gang Chen is a Chinese-born American mechanical engineer and nanotechnologist. He is the Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering at MIT, and the past Head of the MIT Mechanical Engineering Department. He directed the Solid-State Solar-Thermal Energy Conversion Center, an Energy Frontier Research Center formerly funded by the US Department of Energy. Chen is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering.

Education

Chen was an assistant professor at Duke University, a tenured associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, before being recruited by MIT in 2001. Chen has made major contributions to thermoelectricity, nanotechnology, and thermal engineering.

Awards and honors

Chen is a recipient of the K.C. Wong Education Foundation fellowship and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. He has received the NSF Young Investigator Award, an R&D 100 award, and the ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award. He is a fellow of the AAAS, the APS, and the ASME. In 2010, he was elected a member of the US National Academy of Engineering for contributions to heat transfer at the nanoscale and to thermoelectric energy conversion technology.. He was elected as an academician of Academia Sinica in the Division of Engineering Science in 2014. In 2014, he also received the Nukiyama Memorial Award of the Heat Transfer Society of Japan. He was elected as a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on April 2018.