Dr. Chris Dames is the Howard Penn Brown Chair in Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds a joint appointment at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in the Materials Science Division. Currently he also serves as the chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department.
Dr. Dames earned his PhD from MIT in 2006 under Gang Chen, following a BS and MS (under Arun Majumdar) from UC Berkeley. He was previously an Assistant Professor at UC Riverside before joining UC Berkeley in 2011.
Dr. Dames’ research interests emphasize fundamental studies of heat transfer and energy conversion at the nanoscale, using both theoretical and experimental methods. Some topics of current interest include graphene, nanocrystalline materials, mean free path distributions, thermoelectrics, biological systems, and highly anisotropic and nonlinear transport including thermal rectification. For his research he was recognized with an NSF CAREER Award, DARPA Young Faculty Award, Viskanta Fellowship, the Heat Transfer Lectureship at Purdue University, and selection to the Faculty Leadership Academy at UC Berkeley.