Dr. Alfonso Ortega
Dr. Alfonso Ortega is the James R. Birle Professor of Energy Technology at Villanova University. He is the Director of the Laboratory for Advanced Thermal and Fluid Systems which he founded in 2005. He is the Site Director for the NSF Center for Energy Smart Electronic Systems (ES2) founded in 2011 with Binghamton University, University of Texas-Arlington, and Georgia Tech. He received his B.S. from The University of Texas-El Paso, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University, all in Mechanical Engineering. Dr. Ortega was on the faculty of the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at The University of Arizona in Tucson for 18 years, where he directed the Experimental and Computational Heat Transfer Laboratory. From 2004 to 2006, Dr. Ortega was the Program Director for Thermal Transport and Thermal Processing in the Chemical and Transport Systems Division of The National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia, where he managed the NSF’s primary program funding heat transfer and thermal technology research in U.S. universities. Since 2006 he has been on the faculty of Mechanical Engineering at Villanova University. From 2007-2012 he served as Associate Dean of the College of Engineering for Graduate Programs and Research. In 2012 he was named the inaugural Associate Vice President for Research and Graduate Programs at Villanova and served in that role until 2016.
Dr. Ortega is an internationally recognized researcher in the areas of thermal management of data centers and electronic systems, convective and conjugate heat transfer in complex flows, experimental measurements in the thermal sciences, and thermal management in energy systems. He has supervised over 40 M.S. and Ph.D. candidates to degree completion, 5 postdoctoral researchers, and more than 70 undergraduate research students. He is the author of over 200 journal and symposia papers, book chapters, and monographs. He is a teacher of heat transfer, thermodynamics, fluid mechanics and thermal-fluid system design and a frequent professional short course lecturer in the areas of electronics cooling and experimental measurements.
Dr. Ortega’s research over the past 30 years has made important contributions in many areas including (i) natural convection cooling of electronic systems, (ii) forced convection in complex electronic packaging, (iii) modeling and experimental characterization of air-cooled heat sinks, (iv) thermal modeling and measurements in electronic packaging, (v) jet impingement heat transfer, (vi) synthetic jet heat transfer, (vii) heat transfer in advanced liquid cooled mini- and micro-heat exchangers and cold plates, and (viii) spray cooling and droplet impingement heat transfer and fluid dynamics. More recently the work of his research team has also been focused on the energy and thermal management of data centers with research in areas such as (ix) modeling and measurements of complex air-flows in data center environments, (x) dynamic on-demand thermal systems, and (xi) single and two-phase liquid cooling, and (xii) recovery and re-use of data center waste heat.
Dr. Ortega is a Fellow of the ASME. He is the recipient of the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, the ASME Electronic Packaging Division Thermal Management Award, the SEMITHERM Significant Contributor Award, and the Harvey Rosten Award for Excellence. He has been an Associate Editor of the ASME Journal of Heat Transfer, Associate Editor of the ASME Journal of Electronic Packaging and Guest Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Components, Packaging, and Manufacturing Technology. He has chaired the ASME K16 Committee on Heat Transfer in Electronic Equipment, the ASME Electronic and Photonic Packaging Division, the ASME/IEEE ITHERM Symposium, the IEEE SEMITHERM Symposium, and the ASME InterPACK Conference. He currently chairs the ASME Heat Transfer Division Honors and Awards Committee.