The Nukiyama Memorial Award

Prof. Peter Stephan as the first recipient of the Nukiyama Memorial Award

Prof. Peter Stephan

At the Annual Meeting of the Heat Transfer Society of Japan in Toyama on May 31, 2012, it was announced that the Nukiyama Memorial Award, which was established by the Society on its 50th anniversary in 2011, is bestowed to Dr. Peter Stephan, Professor of Technical Thermodynamics at the Technische Universitat Darmstadt, Germany, for his outstanding contributions in the field of boiling heat transfer. He developed sophisticated scientific methodologies and performed a series of seminal experimental and numerical studies, thereby contributed substantially to a much deeper insight into the relevant two-phase heat and mass transfer phenomena. The plaque and certificate with an honorarium of 500,000JPY was conferred at the Award Ceremony after the awardee’s lecture at the Third International Forum on Heat Transfer held in Nagasaki, November 13-15, 2012. (Official announcement from HTSJ is here.)

The Nukiyama Memorial Award commemorates outstanding contributions by Shiro Nukiyama as an excellent heat transfer scientist. He addressed the challenges of the boiling phenomena and published a pioneering paper, which clarified these phenomena in the form of the Nukiyama curve (boiling curve). This epoch-making work was done in 1930s, when heat transfer research was in an early stage and Nukiyama himself was young, under forty years old. The Award shall be bestowed to a scientist under about fifty years of age, once every two years in the field of Thermal Science and Engineering.

The establishment of the Award was announced with the Call for Nomination released in October 2011. The Award was well accepted by the research community at large, and quality nominations were submitted from all over the world before the end of January 2012. All nominees were evaluated impartially and rigidly by the Award Board. The Board for the Nukiyama Award 2012 is composed by the following individuals.


Chairperson: Nobuhide Kasagi (Professor, The University of Tokyo, Japan)
Vice-Chairperson: Masanori Monde (Professor, Saga University, Japan)
Members: Avram Bar-Cohen (Professor, University of Maryland, USA)
Gian Piero Celata (Professor, ENEA, Italy)
Ping Cheng (Professor, Shanghai Jiaotong University, China)
Satish Kandlikar (Professor, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA)
Hideo Yoshida (Professor, Kyoto University, Japan)