6/11/2021 Julia Park
Written by Julia Park
Associate Professor Nenad Miljkovic was named the 2021 winner of the Bergles-Rohsenow Young Investigator Award in Heat Transfer from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).
The award recognizes a young engineer who has contributed significantly to the study of heat transfer in their early career. Established by AMSE’s Heat Transfer Division in 2003, the award was funded through the efforts of Arthur Bergles and Warren Rohsenow who are well known for their accomplishments in heat transfer research and for their mentoring of young researchers.
Miljkovic was awarded “for significant contributions to the fundamental understanding of phase change heat transfer, in particular the dropwise condensation of steam, and the development of materials enabling the dropwise condensation of low surface tension fluids.”
Miljkovic’s most recent achievements on the fundamental understanding of dropwise condensation of steam, including fundamental mechanisms governing dropwise condensation and degradation physics; as well as the development of materials to enable the dropwise condensation of low surface tension fluids, represent solutions to century-old foundational problems in the field of phase change heat transfer, which have only in the past several years been addressed through his published research.
His prior awards from ASME include: ASME Pi Tau Sigma Gold Medal (2018); ASME ICNMM Outstanding Early Career Award (2018); and the ASME Micro/Nano Heat Transfer Heat and Mass Transfer International Conference (MNHMT 2012) Best Paper Award. Additional recent awards include he is the NSF CAREER Award, ACS Petroleum Research Fund Doctoral Young Investigator Award, ONR Young Investigator Award, United Kingdom Royal Society of Engineering Distinguished Visiting Fellowship, U.S. NAS Arab-American Frontiers Fellowship, ASME Pi Tau Sigma Gold Medal, ASME ICNMM Outstanding Early Career Award, UIUC Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research, and US Army Corps of Engineers CERL and ERDC R&D Technical Achievement Awards. In 2020, he received the Outstanding Young Manufacturing Award from the Society of Manufacturing Engineers.
Miljkovic earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 2009 from the University of Waterloo (Canada), and MS and PhD degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT in 2011 and 2013, working with Professor Evelyn Wang. After a one-year postdoctoral position working with Professor Gang Chen at MIT, he joined MechSE as an assistant professor in 2014. He has courtesy appointments with MRL, ECE, and the International Institute for Carbon-Neutral Energy Research (I2CNER), a collaboration between UIUC and Kyushu University in Japan. In 2018, he was promoted to Associate Director of the Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Center (ACRC), which is an NSF-founded I/UCRC. In 2019 he was named a Kritzer Faculty Fellow at UIUC.