By UCLA Samueli Newsroom
UCLA Samueli Professor Tim Fisher, a world leader in understanding how tiny entities like atoms and molecules transport energy and heat, has been named the inaugural holder of the John P. and Claudia H. Schauerman Endowed Chair in Engineering.
The Schauerman Chair was created with a $1 million gift from John and Claudia Schauerman, along with a matching gift from the Samueli Foundation. John Schauerman ’79 is a retired finance executive. He was most recently the executive vice president of Primoris Services Corp., a leading engineering construction company focused on energy infrastructure facilities throughout the United States.Fisher, who is also the chair of the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, leads the Nanoscale Transport Research Group. It studies transport processes by electrons, phonons, photons, and fluids, with an eye toward addressing problems in aerospace, energy, micro- and nanoelectronics manufacturing, and sensor systems. He joined the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering faculty in 2017, following 15 years at Purdue University. There, he held the James G. Dwyer Professorship in Mechanical Engineering. He is also the founding director of the Center for Integrated Thermal Management of Aerospace Vehicles, which is supported by the U.S. Air Force and leading aerospace companies.
Fisher was a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award, is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and will receive the 2018 Heat Transfer Memorial Award from ASME. He is also an adjunct professor in the International Centre for Materials Science at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR, India), is the co-director of the Joint Centre on Nanomaterials for Clean Energy and Environmental Sensors in collaboration with JNCASR and other partners, and recently became a guest professor in the College of Energy Engineering at Zhejiang University (China).
He received his doctoral and bachelor’s degrees from Cornell University.