Dr. Arunava Majumdar holds the Almy and Agnes Maynard Chair in Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering in 1985 from IIT-Bombay, and then completed his MS and PhD from UC Berkeley in 1987 and 1989, respectively. After spending three years as a faculty member in Arizona State Univ. (1989-92) and four years in UC Santa Barbara (1992-96), he joined UC Berkeley where he served as the Vice Chair in Mechanical Engineering from 1999-2002.

For more than a decade, Professor Majumdar has been an active researcher in the area of nanoscale science and engineering, an area that forms the foundation for the emerging field of nanotechnology. He has pioneered a variety of experimental and theoretical approaches for studying transport phenomena in nanostructures, where confinement of electrons, photons, phonons, and fluids provides unique opportunities to manipulate their behavior in novel ways.

More recently, he has developed new approaches to study the nanomechanics of biological molecules (DNA, proteins etc), which are forming the basis for multiplexed bioassays that are important both in molecular biology as well as biotechnology.

Dr. Majumdar is a recipient of numerous awards including the Silver Medal from IIT- Bombay, NSF Young Investigator Award, the ASME Melville Medal, and the 2001 Gustus Larson Memorial Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). He is currently serving as an editor for the International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, and the co-editor-in-chief of Microscale Thermophysical Engineering. He also serves as the Chair, Board of Advisors, ASME Nanotechnology Institute; Member, Council on Materials Science and Engineering, US Dept. of Energy; and Member, Chancellor’s Advisory Council on Nanoscience and Nanoengineering at UC Berkeley. He is a fellow of the ASME and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).