Dr. Thomas Adams

Dr. Thom Adams earned his BS in Mechanical Engineering from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, USA, and his MS and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. Currently Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, he has taught over 14 different courses and has won the coveted Dean’s Outstanding Teaching Award. He has won best paper awards for both his work in engineering education and for technical research. The topic of his dissertation concerned both single-phase and two-phase heat transfer in microchannels, and represents some of the seminal work in the field. He has since become a leading educator in the field of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and has authored a first of its kind textbook on the subject, aimed at an audience of undergraduate technical majors, regardless of their particular field. His current research focuses on what he calls the “scholarship of generalisation,” in which physical systems and processes are purposely modelled using the most fundamental concepts and methods available in order to ascertain physical trends and correlations that often go unnoticed.

Topic of Keynote: On the Scholarship of Generalisation: Research at a Higher Level

Keynote Abstract

Dr. Gergely Kristóf

Dr. Gergely Kristóf earned his MSc degree at the present Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME). In his PhD thesis he developed a two-fluid model for the expansion of partially ionized pellet clouds in hot fusion plasmas. He is currently associate professor at the Department of Fluid Mechanics of BME. Dr. Kristóf has a 16 years practice in the industrial application of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), participated in about 300 industrial consultancy projects in several application fields, such as atmospheric flows, porous media flows, heat exchanger modeling, building services engineering, water treatment, hydraulics and pipe transients. He also played a significant role in the introduction of CFD into the Hungarian higher education. He is member of ERCOFTAC and the Scientific Advisory Committee of Von Karman Institute.

Topic of Keynote: Investigation of Transfer Characteristics of Complex Surfaces by using Periodic Models

Keynote Abstract