Keynote Speakers

Alessandro Croce is Associate Professor of Flight Mechanics at the Department of Aerospace Science and Technology of the Politecnico di Milano. Prof. Croce works in the area of multibody-aero-servo-elastic modeling and simulation of rotorcraft systems and wind turbines, vehicles flight mechanics, control theory. His areas of expertise also include wind turbine design, multidisciplinary optimization of rotor systems, wind tunnel testing and airborne wind energy systems (AWEs) design and flight mechanics. On these topics, he has co-authored about 140 publications in peer-reviewed international journal papers, book chapters and conference proceedings. He is representative of Politecnico di Milano within the European Academy of Wind Energy (EAWE), associate editor of the Wind Energy Science journal and he is coordinating the POLI-Wind Laboratory (the wind energy laboratory within the Aerospace Department). In 2018 he has been Chairman of the International Conference The Science of Making Torque from Wind (TORQUE2018).

Alvaro Toubes Prata is a Full Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), where he has been teaching, leading research and coordinating projects for 44 years. With important contributions to the fields of heat transfer and fluid mechanics, he was recipient of the CNPq Researcher 1A grant for 30 years. He served the Federal University of Santa Catarina as the Vice-President for research and graduate education (2000-2004) and as its President (2008-2012). He was the National Secretary for Technological Development an Innovation (2012-2014 and 2016-2018), the National Secretary for Policies and Programs of Research and Development (2018) and Vice-Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation (2014-2015). He is a full member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, and of the National Academy of Engineering. He has received the Anisio Teixeira Education Award on the 60th anniversary of the Brazilian Agency for Higher Education, CAPES, in recognition for his outstanding contribution to the development of Educational Institutions, Science and Technology in Brazil, through teaching, research and institutional leadership. For his outstanding contributions to science, Alvaro Prata was recognized with the Commendation of the National Order of Scientific Merit – Grand Cross Class.

Dr. Gherhardt Ribatski is Full Professor of Multiphase Flow and Heat Transfer at the São Carlos School of Engineering, University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil. He received his BS, MSc. and Doctoral Degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of São Paulo. He held postdoctoral positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) and Universidade da Coruña.  His research interests cover various areas of multiphase flows and heat transfer. Prof. Ribatski is member of the Congress Committee of International Union of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (IUTAM) and Brazilian Delegate to the Assembly for International Heat Transfer Conferences. He is member of Assembly of World Conferences on Experimental Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Virtual Institute of Two-Phase Flow and Heat Transfer, Scientific Council of the International Centre for Heat and Mass Transfer (ICHMT). He was Director Secretary (2016-2017) and is member and President of the Brazilian Society of Mechanical Sciences and Engineering (2018-2021). He is the current coordinator of the CAPES (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel- Brazil) committee for evaluation of graduate programs in the areas of Mechanical, Mechatronics, Naval and Ocean, Aeronautical, Industrial and Petroleum Engineering.  He is member of the area panel of Engineering of FAPESP (São Paulo Research Foundation – Brazil). Prof. Ribatski is subject editor of Applied Thermal Engineering, editor of Experimental Thermal and Fluid Sciences and member of the Editorial Advisory Board of International Journal of Multiphase Flow. He has presented 13 keynote lectures and taken part in the scientific committee of several International Conferences. Dr. Ribatski has over 100 refereed journal publications, 6 book chapters, 1 book and over 120 refereed papers in conferences.

Marcia H. Mantelli received a B.S in mechanical engineer from Campinas State University (UNICAMP) in 1982, a M.S at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) at São José dos Campos, Brazil in 1986 and a Ph.D from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1995. She worked at INPE from 1983 to 1998, developing spacecraft thermal control systems. In 1999, she joined the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil, as mechanical engineering faculty Professor, starting a heat pipe laboratory for space applications, which now has provided thermal solutions for a wide range of industries. She received several grants from major industries in Brazil and, under her supervision, a 2000m2 laboratory building, dedicated to heat pipe technologies research, was constructed. As result of her cooperation with the industry, she holds more than ten patents and authored (and co-authored) over 200 publications. In 2021, she published, as the only author, the book: Thermosyphons and Heat Pipes: Theory and Applications, by Springer and Nature. She supervises/supervised more than 20 doctoral thesis and 70 master´s dissertations. She received 18 awards, including Claudia Magazine’s best woman scientist in Brazil, in 2012 and “Women in Highlight”, from CREA, in 2015. She is Associate Fellow and Associate Editor of AIAA International Journal of Thermophysics and Heat Transfer and reviewer of fifteen of the major international journals in her research area. She recorded a TEDx Talk video in 2014. She has frequently been invited for round table and talks about the participation and contributions of women in engineering.

Professor Pedro Coelho graduated in Mechanical Engineering in 1984 and received his Ph.D. in 1992 from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon, Portugal. He is professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of IST, being currently the head of the Department. He has about 100 papers published in international journals, and more than 120 papers presented at international conferences. He is co-author of a book on Combustion (in Portuguese) for undergraduate and master students. His research is in the field of numerical simulation of heat transfer and combustion problems. Specific areas of interest are radiation models, turbulence-radiation interaction, computational heat transfer, turbulent diffusion flames, mild combustion and industrial combustion equipment. He is member of the Eurotherm Committee for the Advancement of Thermal Sciences and Heat Transfer, member of the Scientific Council, Assembly and Executive Committee of the International Centre of Heat and Mass Transfer, member of the Assembly for International Heat Transfer Conferences and member of the Assembly of the World Conference (AWC) on Experimental Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics, and Thermodynamics. He is associate editor of the J. Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer, Int. J. Thermal Sciences, and member of the advisory board of Computational Thermal Sciences, Heat Transfer Research and Energy for a Clean Environment.

Prof. Satish Kandlikar is the Gleason Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology. His research is mainly focused in the area of flow boiling. After investigating the flow boiling phenomena from an empirical standpoint, which resulted in widely accepted correlations for different geometries, he started to look at the problem from a fundamental perspective. Using the high speed photography techniques, he demonstrated that small bubbles are released at a high frequency under flow conditions. His current work involves developing ultra-high performance pool and flow boiling heat transfer surfaces, stabilizing flow boiling in microchannels, interface mechanics during rapid evaporation, and advanced chip cooling with single-phase liquid flow. He has published over 200 journal and conference papers. He is a fellow member of ASME and has been the organizer of the two international conferences on Microchannels and Minichannels sponsored by ASME. Dr. Kandlikar founded the ASME Heat Transfer chapter in Rochester and founded and served as the first Chairman of the E-cubed fair – science and engineering fair for middle school students in celebration of the Engineers Week. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Eisenhart Award for Outstanding and Trustees Scholarship Award – both from RIT, Engineer of the Year Award from Rochester Engineering Society, and Heat Transfer Memorial Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.