The Nukiyama Memorial Award

Prof. Gang Chen as the second recipient of the Nukiyama Memorial Award

Prof. Gang Chen

At the Annual Meeting of the Heat Transfer Society of Japan in Hamamatsu on May 22, 2014, it was announced that the Nukiyama Memorial Award is bestowed to Dr. Gang Chen, Professor of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, for his outstanding contributions in the field of nanoscale transport and energy conversion phenomena. The plaque and certificate with an honorarium of 500,000JPY will be conferred at the Award Ceremony after the awardee’s lecture at the 15th International Heat Transfer Conference held in Kyoto, August 10-15, 2014. (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 Call for the second Nomination was released in June 2013. Quality nominations were submitted from all over the world before the end of September 2013. All nominees were evaluated impartially and rigidly by the Award Board. The Board for the Nukiyama Award 2014 is composed by the following individuals.


Chairperson: Masanori Monde (Professor, Saga University, Japan)
Vice-Chairperson: Hideo Yoshida (Professor, Kyoto University, Japan)
Gian Piero Celata (Professor, ENEA, Italy)
Satish Kandlikar (Professor, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA)
Joon Sik Lee (Professor, Seoul National University, Korea)
Ken Okazaki (Professor, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan)
Terrence W. Simon (Professor, University of Minnesota, USA)