UCLA Engineering: Vijay K. Dhir, Dean of the School

Vijay K. Dhir, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, was named Dean of UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science in March 2003.

Born in India, Dhir received his Bachelor of Science degree from Punjab Engineering College in Chandigarh, India, in 1965 and his Master of Technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, India, in 1968. He came to the United States in 1969 to continue his studies in mechanical engineering, receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky in 1972. Dhir joined the faculty at UCLA in 1974.

In the late 1960s he worked for a short period in industry as an engineer, and for the past 30 years he has been a consultant for numerous organizations, including GE Corp., Rockwell International, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Los Alamos and Brookhaven National Labs.

Dhir served as vice chair of the UCLA Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from 1988 to 1991, and was chair of that department from 1994 to 2000. From July 2001 to February 2002, he served as the school's associate dean for academic and faculty issues and as Interim Dean from February 2002 to March 2003.

He has worked to make UCLA Engineering a hub for interdisciplinary research. In recent years, the School has won seven competitive research centers from the federal government and private industry that will bring more than $100 million dollars to Southern California to spur research and development on emerging technologies.

In 2006, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering – among the highest honors awarded to engineers – for his work in boiling heat transfer and nuclear reactor thermal hydraulics and safety. Dhir received the 2004 Max Jakob Memorial Award, the first person from UCLA to receive the award since L. M. K. Boelter, the founding dean of the School. He is a fellow of ASME and the American Nuclear Society. In 2004, he was selected as an inductee into the University of Kentucky’s Engineering Hall of Distinction. He has also received the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Heat Transfer Memorial Award in the Science category and the Donald Q. Kern award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

Dhir has been the senior technical editor for the American Society of Mechanical Engineers' Journal of Heat Transfer since 2000. Prior to being named senior technical editor, he also served as the Journal's associate editor. He is also a former assistant editor of Applied Mechanics Review. He is on the advisory boards of several other journals.

He also leads the boiling heat transfer lab, which has conducted pioneering work in fundamental and applied sciences involving boiling, an efficient process of heat removal. Currently the lab is involved in the study of flow boiling, micro-gravity boiling, and nuclear reactor thermal hydraulics. Since 1999 a team of researchers led by Dhir has been taking part in a NASA research program to examine the effects of boiling in space. He has also partnered with UCLA electrical engineering professor Elliott Brown on an innovative method of removing high heat fluxes from power amplifier chips. Thirty PhD students and forty MS students have graduated under Dhir's supervision. He is author or co-author of more than 250 papers published in archival journals and proceedings of conferences.

Office of the Dean
7400 Boelter Hall, Box 951600
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1600