Winner of the 2021 Mechanical Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award, Michigan State University College of Engineering
John R. Thome is professor emeritus at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he founded and headed the two-phase flow and heat transfer laboratory in 1998 and directed the doctoral programme in energy for 15 years. He brought more than 100 Ph.D. students into the programme before retiring in 2018.
He earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering at MSU in 1975, he obtained his Ph.D. at Oxford University in 1978.
He returned to Michigan State as an assistant professor in 1979 and was promoted to associate professor in 1984, having been principal investigator of three National Science Foundation grants and co-PI of two more. He left MSU in 1985 to start his own international heat transfer engineering consulting company (but maintained his lab in operation until about 1990 as an adjunct).
In 1998 he returned to academics joining the EPFL as the chair in Heat and Mass Transfer. His research and engineering work have encompassed numerous facets of macro- and microscale two-phase heat transfer and fluid mechanics and development of new technologies, most recently micro-cooling systems for electronics.
He is the current co-owner and technical director of JJ Cooling Innovation Sàrl in Lausanne and Global Cooling Technology Group LLC in Phoenix.
He is the author of five books and is editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Two-Phase Heat Transfer and Flow (16 volumes).
He received the 2017 Nusselt-Reynolds Prize, the 2019 IEEE ITHERM Award and the 2019 ASME InterPack Medal, the ASME Heat Transfer Division's Journal of Heat Transfer Best Paper Award in 1998, the United Kingdom's Institute of Refrigeration J.E. Hall Gold Medal in 2008, the 2010 ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award, among others.
About 20 of his former students and post-doctoral assistants are now professors in Europe, Brazil and the United States.