The Nukiyama Memorial Award

Prof. Ronggui Yang as the fifth recipient of the Nukiyama Memorial Award

Prof. Ronggui Yang

At the Annual Meeting of the Heat Transfer Society of Japan on May 30, 2020, it was announced that the Nukiyama Memorial Award 2020 is bestowed to Dr. Ronggui Yang, Endowed Professor of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, for his outstanding contributions in the field of heat and mass transfer, in particular thermal energy transport in micro/nano-scales. The plaque and certificate with an honorarium of 500,000JPY will be conferred at the Award Ceremony after the awardee’s lecture at the 2nd Asian Conference on Thermal Sciences (2nd ACTS) held in Fukuoka, Japan, October 3-7, 2021.

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 fifth Nomination was released in September 2019. Eight quality nominations were submitted from all over the world before the end of December 2019. All nominees were evaluated impartially and rigidly by the Award Committee.


Chairperson Shigenao Maruyama (President, National Institute of Technology, Hachinohe College, Japan)
Vice-Chairperson Yasuyuki Takata (Professor, Kyushu University, Japan)
Kazuhiko Suga (Professor, Osaka Prefecture University, Japan)
John Richard Thome (EPFL, Switzerland)
John H. Lienhard V (MIT, USA)
Sung Jin Kim (KAIST, S. Korea)
Zhuomin Zhang (Georgia Tech. USA)