10/21/2024 Taylor Parks
Written by Taylor Parks
Associate Professor Craig Bradshaw joined the MechSE community and assumed the role of Executive Director of the Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Center (ACRC) earlier this year.
The Indiana native, who previously held a faculty position as Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Oklahoma State University (OSU), was happy to move back closer to home. “My family’s all very close [to Champaign] and my wife’s from Illinois,” he said. “[The University of Illinois] is a fabulous institution and the opportunity to participate in leadership [at the ACRC] was also very appealing. It felt like the stars had aligned.”
Bradshaw earned his bachelor’s degree and PhD in mechanical engineering from Purdue University. After graduation, he joined the Georgia-based company Torad Engineering as a compressor research engineer, later promoting to Manager of Research and Development.
“My intent was always to go into academics after graduation,” Bradshaw recalled of his plans from graduate school, during which time his research focused on compressor technology. “Then, I had an opportunity to join a startup company that was developing a new compressor technology. I thought that I’d probably never do something like that again, so I decided to take a leap of faith.”
Over the next four years, Bradshaw assisted the company in building tools to develop and test their new technology.
“When I got to a point where I felt like I’d done all that could, I started looking for academic jobs,” Bradshaw said. He joined the OSU faculty in 2016 and founded the Center for Integrated Building Systems in 2020. Four years later, a fitting opportunity arose to return to the Midwest.
This semester, Bradshaw has been settling in with both the MechSE community and the ACRC and is working on establishing a research lab. Seven of his graduate students followed him from Oklahoma to Illinois and are getting settled in as well.
“I’m very interested in developing technologies that help us utilize energy better,” Bradshaw said of his research. “The desire to decarbonize the world is the catalyst for my research—energy usage and carbon production are closely related.”
His personal values align with those of the ACRC, which has been investigating methods for decarbonization, alongside its dozens of industry partners, since 1988.
“I want the ACRC to become a better version of itself,” Bradshaw said of his goals for the center. “I want to help it grow to bigger heights and see more of our work be put to use in industry and shared with the world.”
Bradshaw is also enthusiastic about immersing in the MechSE community. “[MechSE] is a big, diverse department and I’m really excited to get to know all the faculty and staff and look for other faculty to collaborate with,” he said. “I’m also very excited that there’s such a fundamental underpinning of the work that happens in MechSE. It feels like a really good opportunity to learn and grow.”
Bradshaw will teach ME 200 (Thermodynamics) in Spring 2025. Students who would like more information about joining his research lab can contact him at crbad@illinois.edu.