Arun Majumdar, Almy & Agnes Maynard Chair Professor in Mechanical Engineering, has been named Head of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at Lawrence National Berkeley Laboratory.

The mission of Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division is to perform research and development leading to better energy technologies that reduce adverse energy-related environmental impacts. The Division's work increases the efficiency of energy use, reduces its environmental effects, provides the nation with environmental benefits, and helps developing nations achieve similar goals through technical advice.

EETD carries out its work through the support of the U.S. Department of Energy (the Division's primary sponsor), other federal entities, state governments and the private sector. Its staff of 300 represents a diverse cross section of fields and skills, ranging from architecture, physics, and mechanical engineering to economics and public policy.

Many staff members have joint appointments at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Division draws on students and recent graduates from UC and other academic institutions for research assistants and postdoctoral appointments.

Professor Arun Majumdar received a B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-B) in 1985, and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989, for research conducted in the laboratory of Professor Chang-Lin Tien. After being on the faculty of Arizona State University (1989-92) and University of California, Santa Barbara (1992-96), he began his faculty appointment in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley on January 1, 1997. He currently holds the Almy and Agnes Maynard Chair Professorship in the College of Engineering.

In addition to his faculty appointment, Professor Majumdar serves as the Director of the Berkeley Nanosciences and Nanoengineering Institute. He is also a member of the Nanotechnology Technical Advisory Group to the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). He served as the founding chair of the ASME Nanotechnology Institute, and is currently a member of the Council of Materials Science and Engineering at the Department of Energy. He also serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, Molecular and Cellular Biomechanics, and is the editor in chief of Micro/Nanoscale Thermophysical Engineering.

Professor Majumdar is a recipient of the Institute Silver Medal (IIT-B) (1985), NSF Young Investigator Award (1992-97), ASME Melville Medal (1992), the Best Paper award of the ASME Heat Transfer Division of ASME (1993), Gustus Larson Memorial Award of the ASME (2001), and Distinguished Alumni Award from IIT-B (2002). He is a fellow of ASME and AAAS, and is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering.

Professor Majumdar's research interests are in the broad area of mechanics and transport in nanostructured materials. Of particular current interest are phonon dynamics and transport in low-dimensional materials, materials and devices for thermoelectric energy conversion, transport and reactions in confined liquids (nanofluidics), chemomechanics of small and macromolecules with applications in chem/biosensing, and nanoscale imaging.

Below are excerpts from Majumdar's speech given after the LBNL announcement of his appointment to be the Director of EETD on 22 October 2007:

We are living in some interesting times.  Let me explain this with some history. 

In the year 2000, there were several articles about “What was the most important invention of the 20th century.” Aeroplanes, nuclear energy, space flight, computers? Each of these can qualify, but upon analysis none of them did.  So what was it?

The history about the most important 20th century invention starts in 1898 when Sir William Crookes, the then president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, called upon the scientific community to save the world from impending starvation.  The population in Europe was growing, but there were not enough nutrients in the soil to grow food, and bacteria and biocatalysts were insufficient to replenish the soil.  The scientific community went to work and within 10 years, in 1908, Fritz Haber found a catalyst that could fix atmospheric nitrogen to form ammonia.  By 1913, Carl Bosch developed a process to mass-produce ammonia which became the precursor for artificial fertilizers.  Fertilizers saved the world from global famine and the world population grew from 1.6 billion people in 1900 to about 6 billion in 2000.  Haber received the Nobel prize in Chemistry in 1918 and Bosch did so in 1931.  No other invention in the 20th century had such a big impact on humankind.

Now fast-forward 100 years.  In the year 2100, if people ask the question: What was the most important invention of the 21st century? It is fair to say that at this point we really don’t know.  But there is a finite chance that history might go like this.

In 1988, the United Nations formed a group called IPCC to evaluate the risks of climate change caused by human activity.  The IPCC concluded that indeed CO2 emission from burning fossil fuel was causing climate change, and called the scientific community as well as world leaders to act quickly.  This led to an intense period of inventions, discoveries and innovations in energy and environmental research, but the solutions were multiple – some to address the demand side and some to address the supply side.  And a large fraction of those inventions and innovations came from Berkeley, CA, where the combination of the best national lab and the best university could collectively address these large global problems.  Their work allowed US to take a leadership role in how to create an economy based on green technologies, and allowed China, India, and the developing world to simultaneously address both economic growth and sustainability, and thereby avoid a global catastrophe.

I believe the future Habers and Boschs are either here in this room, or in LBL, or on campus.  If not, we will recruit them and give them the resources for them to flourish.  We live in California, the most progressive state in USA, and we are in the middle of the most vibrant ecosystem to convert technical innovations into global impact.  In short, we are sitting on a golden opportunity to use science and engineering to positively impact humankind at an unprecedented scale. Together, we can make history.

Congratulations Professor Majumdar, and congratulations EETD!