Centers & Groups

• UCLA Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering

• Air Force Research Lab, Materials & Manufacturing Directorate

• California NanoSystems Institute

• International Centre for Materials Science (Bangalore, India)

• Network for Computational Nanotechnology

Online Courses, Lectures, and Tools

• Thermal Energy at the Nanoscale, a nanoHUB-U short course. Many other nanoHUB-U courses are online; for more information visit the nanoHUB-U page.

• ME 503: Micro-and Nano-scale Energy Transfer Processes

• ME 595M: Computational Methods for Nanoscale Thermal Transport (experimental course, with J. Murthy)

• Now on nanoHUB.org

  • Jamming of Soft Frictionless Spheres, a tool to predict granular microstructure.

  • hotSpice, thermal circuit simulation tool

  • A Bottom-up View of Heat Transfer in Nanomaterials

  • Thermoelectric generator module with convective heat transfer

  • Report of the Joint India-US Workshop on Scalable Nanomaterials for Enhanced Energy Transport, Conversion, and Efficiency

  • 1D atomic chain phonon simulator using atomistic Green’s functions

  • Presentation/podcast on understanding phonons using 1D atomic chains

  • Presentation/podcast on electron emission from carbon nanomaterials

Lectures on nanoHUB

• Thermal Transport across Interfaces (I-phonons)

• Thermal Transport across Interfaces (II-electrons)

• A Bottom-Up View of Heat Transfer in Nanomaterials

• Heat Transfer across Solid Contacts Enhanced with Nanomaterials

• Electron Emission from Nanoscale Carbon Materials

• BNC Annual Research Symposium: Nanoscale Energy Conversion

• Understanding Phonon Dynamics via 1D Atomic Chains

Tools on nanoHUB

• Jamming of Soft Frictionless Spheres

• hotSPICE

• Isotropic Random Fracture Model

• Thermoelectric Generator

• Atomistic Green’s Function Method for 1-D Atomic Chains

Our research group is characterized by a passion for discovering, explaining, and developing new knowledge through persistent effort intelligently applied. Students seeking a research position with us are encouraged to review the admission guidelines provided by UCLA’s Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Graduate Program. Qualified students should then review the other pages of this website to identify specific research topics of mutual interest. These topics should be highlighted in any correspondence and in application materials. Interested students would also benefit from studying the materials contained in the online nanoHUB-U course, Thermal Energy at the Nanoscale, which can be taken in self-paced mode without a registration fee (i.e., free). Prospective students interested in more general information about life at UCLA and its surroundings might benefit from this series of posts.

I receive far more email inquiries from prospective group members than I can manage. Consequently, I have created an online form that interested researchers of all types (undergrad, grad, postdoc) should complete here. The form is intentionally short and should require less than 15 minutes to complete.

This website pertains to my academic work and related research group and campus community activities. Separately, I occasionally provide private consulting and am also co-founder of a company (SolGrapH Inc.) that is involved with solar-thermal material synthesis. These activities fall outside the scope of this website, which is neither intended nor represented as any type of commercial product or promotion.
— TSF