Dr. Ronggui Yang

Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering

Sanders Faculty Fellow in Engineering

University of Colorado at Boulder

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Dr. Ronggui Yang is the Sanders Faculty Fellow in Engineering and an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering directing the Nano-enabled Energy Conversion, Storage, and Thermal Management Systems group (NEXT) at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dr. Ronggui Yang is also a faculty research scientist of the National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Extreme Ultraviolet Science and Technology (NSF EUV ERC) and the DARPA Focus Center on Nanoscale Science and Technology for Integrated Micro/Nano-Electromechanical Transducers (DARPA iMINT Center). Dr. Yang received his Ph.D degree focusing on Nanoscale Heat Transfer with Prof. Gang Chen in Mechanical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in December 2005 (conferred in February 2006). Since January 2006, he started his faculty career as an assistant professor at CU-Boulder and has been promoted to associate professor with early tenure in summer 2011 (two-year ahead of the normal clock at CU-Boulder). Prior to MIT, he had a master’s degree in MEMS from UCLA in 2001, a master’s degree in Engineering Thermophysics from Tsinghua University in Beijing in 1999, and a Bachelor’s degree in Thermal Engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong University in 1996. His research interests are on nanoscale and ultrafast transport phenomena, and their applications in energy and information technologies and controllable nano-manufacturing. His innovative research has won him numerous national and international awards including the 2010 ASME Bergles-Rohsenow Young Investigator Award in Heat Transfer, an 2009 NSF CAREER Award (the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research), the 2008 MIT Technology Review’s TR35 Award (the 35 young scientists and technologists under the age of 35 whose work--spanning medicine, computing, communications, electronics, nanotechnology, and more--is changing our world), the 2008 DARPA Young Faculty Award (39 rising stars in university microsystems research), the 2005 Goldsmid Award for Research Excellence in Thermoelectrics (the only award from the International Thermoelectrics Society), the Best Research Paper Award from the ASME InterPACK 2005 Conference (1 out of more than 500 papers), and a NASA Tech Brief Award for a Technical Innovation in 2004. Upon his arrival at CU-Boulder in January 2006, Dr. Yang has been continuingly active in developing thermal management technologies for military and civilian devices and systems, developing theoretical and simulation tools for electron and thermal transport in nanostructures, developing low-to-high temperature thermal and thermoelectric property measurement systems for multifunctional materials, developing defect identification mechanisms for atomic layer deposition (ALD) enabled polymer-based flexible hermetic packaging for organic light emitting diode (OLED), and developing the optical pump-and-probe system (ultrafast thermal reflectance) to study the fundamental dynamics of electrons and phonons. Since January 2006, Dr. Ronggui Yang serves as a Principle Investigator or co-Principle Investigator for a few large-scale research projects at CU-Boulder. Dr. Ronggui Yang is an active member of ASME, IEEE, SAE, MRS, APS, and Sigma Xi. Dr. Ronggui Yang regularly serves as a referee or a panelist for about 50 prestigious academic journals including Science, Nature, Nature XX, Physical Review Letters, Nano Letters, ACS Nano, Physical Review B, ASME transactions and IEEE Transactions, and federal funding agencies including Department of Energy (DOE), Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), Army Research Office (ARO), and National Science Foundation (NSF). Dr. Ronggui Yang is a technical committee member for various professional society, a track/symposium organizer or session chair for numerous ASME conferences on nanotechnology and heat transfer and a referee of many technical conference manuscripts. Dr. Ronggui Yang is a co-guest editor for a special issue on “Nanoscale Heat Transfer” in the Journal of Computational and Theoretical Nanosciences. Dr. Ronggui Yang currently holds seven pending patents (or patent disclosures) and has published more than 50 journal papers and numerous conference papers on nanotechnology-enabled energy conversion and thermal management with an annual citation of >300 times since 2011 with exponential growth, to his journal publications according to ISI Web of Science.

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