Plenary Speakers

Speaker biography:

Prof. Gang Chen is currently the Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He served as the head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT from July 2013 to June 2018, and director of the “Solid-State Solar-Thermal Energy Conversion Center (S3TEC Center)” – an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the US Department of Energy from 2009 to 2018. He obtained his PhD degree from the Mechanical Engineering Department, UC Berkeley. He was a faculty member at Duke University and UCLA, before joining MIT in 2001. He received an NSF Young Investigator Award, an Ramp;&D 100 award, an ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award, a Nukiyama Memorial Award by the Japan Heat Transfer Society, a World Technology Network Award in Energy, an Eringen Medal from the Society of Engineering Science, and the Capers and Marion McDonald Award for Excellences in Mentoring and Advising from MIT. He is among Thomas Reuter’s highly cited researchers. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an academician of Academia Sinica, and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering.

Speaker biography:

Philippe Ben-Abdallah is Research Director at CNRS in France and adjunct Professor at Sherbrooke University in Canada. He is head of the team “thermoplasmonic” of Charles Fabry Laboratory at the Institut d’Optique at Paris. He got his PhD in applied Physics at ENSMA in 1997. During the years 1998-1999, he was a Post-doctoral fellow at Quebec University in Canada where he worked on radiative heat transfers at mesoscopic scale in heterogeneous media. He held a tenured position at CNRS at Poitiers in 2000 and became Senior Researcher at CNRS in 2008 at Nantes where he led the group “heat transfer in materials”. Since 2011 he is CNRS Senior Research Fellow at Charles Fabry Laboratory where he develops the “thermoplasmonics” group.

His research activities are mainly on nanophysics and mesoscopic physics, plasmonics and near-field heat transfer with applications in the fields of nanoscale thermal management, energy conversion/harvesting, IR spectroscopy and data recording. He is author of more than 250 scientific communications, and has co-edited two books

Speaker biography:

Prof. Jia Zhu is a Professor at College of Engineering and Applied Science, Nanjing University. His research interest is in the area of nanomaterials, nanophotonics and nanoscale heat transfer. He studied Physics at Nanjing University, received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. He has received several prestigious awards including: Tan Kah Kee Young Scientist Award(2018), OSA Young Investigator Award (2017), Dupont Young Professor Award (2016), MIT Tech Review TR35 award (2016), "973" Young Investigator (2014), Division of Inorganic Chemistry Yong Investigator Award (American Chemical Society, 2011), Gold Medal of Graduate Student Award (Material Research Society, 2010), Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Students Abroad (2009). He has published over 70 papers in prestigious journals (Nature Photonics, Nature Nanotech., Nature Materials, Science Advances, PNAS, Joule, Nano Lett., Advanced Materials, etc.). He is a fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry and a managing editor of Nanophotonics(De Gruyter). He serves on the advisory board of Molecular Systems Design & Engineering (Royal Society of Chemistry) and editorial managing board of EnergyChem(Elsevier), and as reviewers for over 30 scientific journals.