Childhood and education
Lienhard was born in 1961 in Pullman, Washington, where his father, John H. Lienhard IV, was a professor at Washington State University. His mother, Carol Ann Bratton, a violinist, was a member of the Washington State University String Quartet. [1] The family moved to Lexington, Kentucky in 1967 when his father took a position at the University of Kentucky. Lienhard attended primary school and high school in Lexington. [2]
Lienhard enrolled at the University of Kentucky when he was 16. He completed his bachelor's degree in engineering, summa cum laude, at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1982, and he took his master's degree in heat and mass transfer at UCLA in 1984 for research on Rayleigh–Bénard instability. [3] He then transferred to the University of California, San Diego, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on wind tunnel measurements of strongly stratified turbulent flow, finishing in 1988. [4] Lienhard's doctoral experiments encompassed Brunt–Väisälä frequencies up to 2.4 s−1 and required the development of hot-wire anemometry usable in the presence of large temperature fluctuations.
Career
Lienhard joined the mechanical engineering faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988, immediately after graduating from UCSD. He has spent his entire professional career at MIT.
Lienhard's initial research at MIT focused on cooling by liquid jet impingement. This work included fundamental convection problems, droplet splattering, free-surface turbulence interactions, and pattern-formation in the hydraulic jump. [5] [6] [7] The thin boundary layer at a jet's stagnation point also provided an attractive avenue to high-heat-flux engineering. In 1993, Lienhard's group reported the highest steady-state fluxes to that date removed from a macroscopic area, achieved using a high-speed water jet (≈40 kW/cm2). [8] They later extended this approach to arrays of jets, allowing larger areas to be cooled at high flux. In 1998, they used an array of water jets at 46 m/s to remove 1.7 kW/cm2 by convection alone over areas of several cm2. [9]
In the 2000s, Lienhard refocused his research on the problem of clean water supply and scarcity, particularly around desalination technologies. He approached this area through his background in thermal engineering and transport phenomena, making energy efficiency a central aim. [10] [11] His group's desalination research has spanned a broad range of topics including humidification-dehumidification, [12] forward and reverse osmosis, [13] membrane distillation, [14] produced water, [15] electrodialysis, nanofiltration, solar desalination, [16] and thermophysical properties. [17] [18] The seawater thermophysical property database developed by his group has been widely used by other researchers.
Lienhard has written hundreds of peer-reviewed research publications and has been issued more than 40 US patents. The patents led to several start-up companies from Lienhard's research group. One of these, Gradiant Corporation, grew to more than $1 billion valuation in 2023. [19]
Lienhard has been responsible for launching a number of major research programs at MIT. He was the founding director of the Center for Clean Water and Clean Energy (2008–2017), a multi-million dollar research collaboration with King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) involving dozens of faculty members at KFUPM and MIT. [20] He was also the founding director of the Ibn Khaldun Fellowship program for Saudi Arabian Women, [21] which has brought dozens of PhD-level women to MIT for research collaborations.
In 2014, Lienhard founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) at MIT, and he served as J-WAFS director until 2025. [22] [23] J-WAFS supports research by MIT faculty on water and food, to address the needs of a rapidly growing population on a changing planet. Under Lienhard's leadership, J-WAFS awarded more than $25 million through competitive peer review, supporting more than 100 projects across all of MIT's schools and engaging more than 300 researchers. In addition to scientific research, a dozen new companies were spun-out of MIT.
Lienhard is a committed educator, recognized with awards for teaching and mentoring. [24] He has written textbooks on measurement and instrumentation, on heat transfer, and on thermal modeling. He has long collaborated with his father on A Heat Transfer Textbook. In 2001, they made the decision to distribute the work primarily as an ebook, one of the first textbooks to adopt this format. [25] The ebook, which is free of charge, has since been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times across the world.
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