Adrienne Lavine joined the UCLA Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in 1984, in the same year she received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley. Her research addresses various aspects of heat transfer, including solar thermal storage, thermal energy harvesting, thermal modeling of nanoscale manufacturing, and thermal aspects of manufacturing processes (e.g. grinding, cutting, and plasma spray). She served as chair of the UCLA Academic Senate in 2005-06 and as department chair in 2006-11. Her honors and awards include the Presidential Young Investigator Award from NSF (1988), the Taylor Medal of CIRP (1990), and the Best Superconductivity Paper Award from ASME (1989). She was elected Fellow of ASME in 1999. She has served as an Associate Editor of two ASME journals: the Journal of Heat Transfer (1995-98) and the Journal of Engineering for Industry (1991-94). She was a recipient of the Henry and Susan Samueli Teaching Award in her department, in 2003. She is presently the Associate Director for Education and Outreach for the NSF-sponsored Center for Scalable and Integrated Nano-Manufacturing and Vice Chair of Undergraduate Programs in her department. She is also a co-author of a pair of heat transfer textbooks, Fundamentals of Heat and Mass Transfer and Introduction to Heat Transfer.

Dr. Aryafar is a postdoctoral researcher at the UCLA Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. In 2014, he designed and built a working prototype of a high-temperature hybrid compressed air storage system, which secured a $1.6 million development grant by the California Energy Commission. Dr. Aryafar research explores the viability of ammonia as a solar energy storage medium through the use of high temperature reactive heat-exchangers. He is currently developing a 5 kW closed loop pilot system capable of producing super-critical steam for the purpose of power generation.

Chen Chen is a Ph.D candidate at the UCLA Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. His emphasis is in Heat and Mass Transfer. He received his Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Columbia University in 2013.

Bingjie Dang is a M.S. student in MAE department at UCLA with an emphasis on Heat and Mass Transfer. She graduates from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2015 with Excellent Graduate honor. Bingjie’s current research area is shell and tube heat exchanger’s design and optimization and she is passionate about renewable and clean energy.