Research Staff
Postdoctoral Researchers
Claire Arthurs
Graduate Student Research Assistant
Claire Arthurs is a fourth-year graduate student researcher in the mechanical engineering department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on probing and characterizing the mechanical response of polymer-electrolyte membranes for hydrogen fuel cells and electrolyzers, particularly in compression. Currently, she is working on compression-creep studies of PFSA membranes in a controlled environment and modeling membrane-electrode assemblies to simulate operational stresses in energy systems. Claire is co-advised by Dr. Ahmet Kusoglu in the Energy Conversion Group at LBL and Dr. Ravi Prasher in the ME department of UC Berkeley.Before joining UC Berkeley, she earned a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. In her free time, Claire enjoys taking care of her plants, doing yoga, and surfing.
Paige Beck
Graduate Student Research Assistant
Paige is a 1st-year Ph.D. student in the mechanical engineering department at UC Berkeley. Her current work focuses on the integration of carbon-capture technology with a carbon dioxide methanation process and the development of electrocaloric cooling materials. Her research interests include energy storage and decarbonization.
Sarah Chen
Graduate Student Research Assistant
Sarah is a 1st year PhD student currently working on a thermal switch project. She has previously worked on modeling absorption refrigeration and ML models for condensation heat transfer in her undergrad at Georgia Tech.
Mingxin Jia
Graduate Student Research Assistant
Mingxin’s current research in the thermal energy group mainly focuses on developing clean and energy-efficient desalination technologies and processes. The areas of particular interest include solar thermal forward osmosis using thermally responsive ionic liquid draw solutions and solute displacement fractional precipitation separation based on miscible organic solvents. With rising global freshwater demand and increasing water stress, these research developments may have applications in providing more reliable water sources through lowering the specific energy consumption of desalination and reducing high-salinity brine discharge.
Alondra Perez
Graduate Student Research Assistant
Alondra is a 4th-year Ph.D. Mechanical Engineering student at the University of California, Berkeley working on condensation phase change. She is currently working on creating a lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) to simulate the initial nucleation and growth of droplets to understand the physics of thermal transport of re-entrant superhydrophobic coatings to guide the future design of surfaces.
Logan Vawter
Graduate Student Research Assistant
Logan Vawter is a 1st-year graduate student researcher in the mechanical engineering department at the University of California, Berkeley. His research work is focused on thermochemical energy storage.
Yun (Zoe) Yang
Graduate Student Research Assistant
Yun Chi, also going by Zoe, is a PhD student in the Mechanical Engineering department at the University of California, Berkeley. Zoey is co-advised by the Thermal Energy Group and Nano/Energy Lab. She received her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Purdue University in 2023. At Purdue, she worked on modeling air water harvesting least work advised by Prof. Warsinger, and boiling with special surface treatment co-advised by Prof. Marconnet and Prof. Weibel. Currently, she is working on the thermal switch and phase change material with the goal to improve energy storage system of buildings.
Buyi Zhang
Graduate Student Research Assistant
Buyi is working on thermal management during the battery manufacturing process and cycling/fast charge. He is interested in battery modeling and the drying process in the roll-to-roll manufacturing of batteries and fuel cells.
Undergraduate Interns:
2023
Sebastian Haney
Kolby Gameros
Daniel Hunter Hawthorne
Faye Liu
2022
Daniel Hunter Hawthorne
Jia Mingxin
Clément Messeri
Hanxiang Wu
Rushabh Sailendra Shah
Yuan Zhu
2021
Joseph Benedetti
Ethan Lee
Clément Messeri
Rushabh Shah
High School Interns:
2023
Sammy Ali
Miranda Liu
Ojas Rokade
2021
Aansh Devpura
Tavleen Kaur
Jessica Liu
Rupal Nimaiyar
Shreya Revanur
Postdocs:
Justin P. Freedman, Staff Product Engineer at Lam Research (LinkedIn)
Jonathan Lau, Battery Scientist at QuantumScape (LinkedIn)
Fuduo Ma, Materials Scientist at Avery Dennison (LinkedIn)
Dalia Martinez Escobar, Junior Research Specialist at University of California, Merced (LinkedIn)
Mauricio Solis de La Fuente, R&D Specialist at Universitat Jaume I, Spain (LinkedIn)
Hao Wang, Data Scientist at Swish Analytics (LinkedIn)
Peiyuan Yu, Assistant Professor at SUSTech, China (ResearchGate)
Bei Fan, Assistant Professor at Michigan State University (LinkedIn)
Zhi Huang, Assistant Professor at Wuhan University, China (ResearchGate)
Mahmoud Elzouka, Packaging Thermal Engineer at Intel Corporation (LinkedIn)
Akanksha Menon, Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech (LinkedIn)
Lin Yang, Assistant Professor at Peking University, China (LinkedIn)
Qiye Zheng, Assistant Professor at HKUST, China (LinkedIn)
Graduate Students:
Others:
Charles Geffroy, Sales Engineer at Tesla (LinkedIn)
Iwan Hächler, Doctoral Student at ETH Zürich (LinkedIn)