People

Dr. Arindam Banerjee is the Paul. B Reinhold Endowed Professor and Department Chair of Mechanical Engineering & Mechanics at Lehigh University (Bethlehem, PA). He is also a co-director of the newly formed Atlantic Marine Energy Center, a U.S. Department of Energy-funded research center on the U.S. East Coast that caters to developing and accelerating marine energy convertors for powering the blue economy. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Texas A&M University (2006) and is an international expert in experimental and computational fluid dynamics. His current research interest includes multi-scale thermo-fluid-dynamics with an emphasis on energy and biological- systems. Ongoing research thrusts include marine renewable energy (river/tidal, wave and offshore wind energy harvesting) with emphasis on the energy-water nexus; fluid dynamics in extreme environments (hydrodynamic instabilities in inertial confinement fusion) and computational pulmonary therapeutics (drug delivery in human lungs under different mechanical ventilation conditions). His research efforts have secured over $20M of competitive federal funding from various agencies. Prof. Banerjee was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2021. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed journal publications, conference papers, abstracts and book chapters. Prof. Banerjee is a Subject (Associate) Editor of Renewable Energy (Elsevier, Impact Factor: 8.64) and handles the offshore energy portfolio of the journal. He is also an Associate Editor for the Journal of Fluids Engineering (ASME, Impact Factor: 1.9), where he handles their biofluids and turbulence portfolio. Prof. Banerjee has been a research leader across campus for various initiatives, including the Rossin College Interdisciplinary Research Institute (IRIs) Envisioning Committee, which led to the formation of the three IRIs. He has been an active member of the Leadership Council of the Institute of Cyberphysical Infrastructure and Energy, where he has played a leading role in the development of research thrust areas in blue-economy and renewable energy that has led to several successful large grants (over $5m in funding). At Lehigh, Prof. Banerjee is also a leader in pedagogical innovation and has spearheaded graduate curriculum changes in MEM which led to streamlining of the MEM Master of Science Program and a complete restructuring of the MEM Ph.D. program. Very recently, Prof. Banerjee teamed up with Prof. Shalinee Kishore (ECE, Lehigh) and faculty across four Lehigh colleges to successfully secure a U.S. National Science Foundation National Research Traineeship funding to initiate an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program on Stakeholder Engaged Energy Decarbonization for Energy Futures; a success for Lehigh since the last NSF NRT(IGERT) award in 1999. Prof. Banerjee has been the major advisor for 30 graduate students (14 PhDs and 16 M.S.). Of these, 26 have completed their degrees and 4 Ph.D. students are at various stages of their studies at Lehigh.