October 19, 2022
By Ashley Ritchie
Yogendra Joshi, John M. McKenney and Warren D. Shiver Distinguished Chair in Building Mechanical Systems and professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, has joined the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a program manager in the Microsystems Technology Office (MTO).
DARPA’s mission is to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security.
As a program manager, Joshi will define, pitch, secure funding for, and execute new research programs in thermal management. Additionally, he will take over the management of some existing MTO programs.
"A DARPA program manager position is a truly exciting, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as it provides a unique opportunity to focus specific areas of interest within the research community on challenges of great significance – both to the Department of Defense and commercial industries," said Joshi.
In this role, Joshi is looking forward to being able to pursue new research programs exploring thermal management technologies that provide orders of magnitude improvement in capabilities compared to the current state-of-the-art.
DARPA program managers typically spend two to four years in the position and their offices are located in Arlington, Virginia, just outside of Washington, DC.
"In the past, I’ve received funding for multiple research opportunities from DARPA. Now, this position allows me to sit on the other side of the table in defining exciting opportunities for our community to work on," said Joshi.
Joshi joined the Georgia Tech faculty in 2001 and his research interests are in multi-scale thermal management. He is the author or co-author of more than 450 publications in this area, including more than 225 journal articles. He received his Bachelor of Technology in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (Kanpur) in 1979, Master of Science in mechanical engineering from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1981, and doctorate in mechanical engineering and applied mechanics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984. He has served as the principal investigator for multiple DARPA programs and for the Office of Naval Research-led Consortium for Optimally Resource-Secure Outposts. He also previously was site director for the National Science Foundation Industry/University Cooperative Research Center on Energy Efficient Electronic Systems.
Joshi is an elected fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and IEEE. He’s been recognized for his contributions through several awards, including the Inventor Recognition Award from the Semiconductor Research Corporation (2001), the IBM Faculty Award (2008), the IIT Kanpur Distinguished Alumnus Award (2011), the AIChE Donald Q. Kern Award (2018), and multiple honors from IEEE and ASME.