Mr Pro-Chancellor,
Professor Chen Gang’s career seems to be a monumental answer to the question: how far can curiosity and perseverance take someone? His research has completely revolutionized our understanding of heat and energy and he continues to make breakthroughs that will be important for generations to come.
Professor Chen is currently Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But his beginnings were much more humble. He was among the generation that grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution and he attended Xiangfan No. 5 High School from 1978-1980. Both his parents were mathematics teachers and taught on farms. And while he had an interest in math, his parents discouraged him from studying it, so instead he wanted to study computers. But when he received the letter of admission from the Huazhong Institute of Technology (now Huazhong University of Science and Technology, or HUST), his wish was not granted. Instead, he was assigned to major in “thermal power plants”, despite having no idea what that was. His father quickly declared, “Oh too bad, you’ll be a boilermaker!”
Chen then spent the next several years at Huazhong working on his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, studying boilers and heat exchangers. He would graduate and stay there as a lecturer from 1987-1989. In 1988, he was interviewed by Professor Chang-Lin Tien as a PhD candidate to receive a fellowship from the K.C. Wong Education Foundation in Hong Kong. He was invited to join Professor Tien’s group first at UC Irvine in 1989 and then at UC Berkeley in 1990, when Professor Tien moved back to Berkeley as its Chancellor. Professor Tien was a giant in the academic world—he was the first person of Asian descent to lead a major university in the US, and he continued to supervise students during his Chancellorship, so committed was he to fostering the next generation.
When I asked Professor Chen who was influential in his life, he stated that Professor Tien was his first real mentor and in several different respects. In the 1980s and 1990s, Professor Tien encouraged his students to work on extremely small scales: nanoscale and microscale. This proved to be visionary and opened a pathway for Chen to work on problems that he could investigate down to the atomic level – from superconductivity to nonlinear optics to semiconductor lasers. Professor Tien encouraged his students to do experiments in addition to theoretical work, despite not having much equipment in his lab after moving back and forth between Irvine and Berkeley. So Chen found himself working in the semiconductor fabrication cleanroom and doing experiments in Electrical Engineering labs addressing heating problems in semiconductor lasers.
He completed his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley in 1993 and moved on to Duke University as an assistant professor. Those years at Duke were not easy for him—he remembers a lot of struggles in securing funding, but he was determined. He carried out a great deal of research himself, both theory and experiments. Although he could not find funding on semiconductor heating problems, the work he did laid the foundation for him to switch direction: finding better semiconductor materials that can convert efficiently between heat and electricity – a field called thermoelectrics.
While at Duke, Chen was a Warren Faculty Scholar in 1996-97 but that didn’t keep him there. After four years at Duke, his research propelled him to the University of California, Los Angeles with a tenured Associate Professor appointment. While at UCLA, MIT called and he could not resist the lure of the No.1 ranked Mechanical Engineering department in the world. So, in 2001, he joined MIT as a tenured Associate Professor and he was promoted to full professor only 3 years later. At MIT, Professor Chen was the first holder of the Warren and Towneley Rohsenow Professorship from 2006-2009, before assuming the Soderberg Professorship in the School of Engineering in 2009. At MIT he continued to serve in many roles, including as Department Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He also established and led the Solid-state Solar Thermal Energy Conversion Center, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the US Department of Energy, and served as the founding director of the Center for Mechanical Engineering Research and Education at MIT and SUSTech. He is currently the Director of the MIT Pappalardo Micro and Nano Engineering Laboratory and the Director of the MIT Rohsenow-Kendall Laboratory.
While a young assistant professor at Duke, Professor Chen encountered the second most influential academic in his life, MIT’s Professor Mildred Spiewak Dresselhaus, known as “Millie”. The famous American physicist, materials scientist and nanotechnologist was known as the “Queen of Carbon Science.” Professor Chen was introduced to Professor Dresselhaus when he switched from semiconductor lasers to the field of thermoelectric energy conversion. Dresselhaus had inspired this field with her predictions of the improved ability of electrons in converting heat and electricity in nanostructures, while Chen brought in his expertise of heat transport in such nanostructures.
Professor Dresselhaus was herself a pioneer, just like Professor Tien. At MIT she was appointed the first female Institute Professor in 1985 and she vigorously advocated for the advancement of women in science. So Professor Chen’s two most important influences were both pioneers at the very apex of academia.
As Professor Chen delved deeper into thermoelectric energy conversion, the interdisciplinary nature of his research forced him to master different fields beyond heat transfer – electrical engineering, materials, physics, chemistry. He realized that studying heat is an unusual field with endless problems to solve. Heat research is also an ancient field, and this is where his contributions shine. It is fair to say that he contributed immensely in leading this field out of the stone age.
His research interests span nanoscale transport and energy conversion phenomena, and their applications in energy storage, conversion and utilization. He has discovered new heat conduction regimes unknown before in nanostructures, rivaling the much more advanced understanding of electrical conduction regimes. His group demonstrated that polymers, that is, plastics can be made to be more thermally conductive than most metals, and explained mechanisms why additives to liquids might significantly improve their thermal conductivity. He and his team have also discovered several materials with thermal conductivity just below diamonds, ranking as second and third best heat conductors. Among his many breakthroughs he and his team discovered that cubic boron arsenide is the best semiconductor material ever found to date. In 2022, this finding was named to the Physics World Top Ten Breakthroughs.
By exploring micro- and nanoscale transport phenomena, Professor Chen’s group has advanced a wide range of technologies such as thermoelectric cooling and power generation, solar thermal and solar photovoltaics, desalination, and thermal interface materials. Two of his inventions were selected by Scientific American as among the annual top ten world-changing ideas in 2012 and again in 2014.
Professor Chen has published nearly 500 technical articles and delivered over 600 invited talks all over the world. He authored a book called Nanoscale Energy Transfer and Conversion, the first textbook in the field, and his lectures and videos are freely available online via the MIT Open Courseware program. Like his mentors before him, Professor Chen has supervised over 90 Masters and PhD students to completion and over 60 post-docs and visiting scholars. More than 60 of his PhD students and post-docs are in academia. He also has over 50 granted and pending patents, and he has co-founded two companies.
Among his many national and international awards, Professor Chen is a recipient of the K.C. Wong Education Foundation fellowship and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship (2002-3). He received the NSF Young Investigator Award, an R&D 100 award (2008), and the ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award (2008) and a Frank Kreith Energy Award. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. In 2010, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He was elected as an academician of Academia Sinica in the Division of Engineering Science in 2014. In 2014 he was awarded a Nukiyama Memorial Award of the Heat Transfer Society of Japan. He received an A.C. Eringen Medal from the Society of Engineering Science in 2016. He was elected as a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018, and of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2023.
In 2024, the Asian American Academy of Science and Engineering recognized Professor Chen with the Inaugural Steven Chu Gold Medal. Also in 2024, he received the American Courage Award given by Asian Americans Advancing Justice. He was proud to find out that his own PhD advisor, Professor Chang-Lin Tien was the inaugural recipient of this award. In addition to his election to several prestigious US academies already mentioned, I have just learnt that this year he has also been elected as a foreign member of the Chinese National Academy of Sciences.
When I asked Professor Chen to reflect on his whole career to date and what he was most proud of, he said he was most proud of the people he helped and supported and their growth, at every level—undergrad, post-graduate, post-docs and all the colleagues who helped him over the years.
And this led him to a third story about how his first mentor, Professor Tien, had helped him gain more training in presentation and writing. He worked with the young PhD student Chen on his talks and presentation skills before conferences, making him do mock presentations many times.
At one point in a final practice session in a hotel room the night before his first talk, Chen must have presented to Professor Tien maybe over 10 times, and he asked how he was doing. Professor Tien shook his head and remarked, “I’m still worried.” He added, “When you give the talk tomorrow, you may feel your heart will jump out at the beginning. But you start speaking loudly and confidently, and you look at me, you will calm down and give a good talk.” Chen followed his advice and his first presentation in the US was a great success.
To this day Professor Chen credits this time and this message with boosting his confidence and making him realise he could do anything.
Professor Chen Gang may perhaps be the most remarkable ‘boilermaker’ the world has ever seen! He has made transformative and lasting contributions to the future of energy technology to advance the entire world. And he continues to serve as an exemplary scholar, mentor, and academic leader for the next generation of scientists and engineers.
Mr Pro-Chancellor, it is my great honour and privilege to present to you Professor Chen Gang, for the award of Doctor of Science, honoris causa.
