Adrian Bejan looks at his work in science as a mechanical engineer for 40 years as “a natural outcome of one lucky break after another.” His luck began when he left communist Romania during a tiny window of liberalism after winning a national contest for scholarships to study engineering abroad. “I came to America as one of six lucky boys and girls, and was the only one handed an application for MIT; the other five were given applications to Berkeley,” he says.
After earning his bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1971, 1972, and 1975, Dr. Bejan was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Miller Institute of Basic Research in Science. “I was hosted by a very famous professor, Chang-Lin Tien," he recalls. "At Berkeley I got the green light to do basic science in engineering. It’s OK to be a scientist in engineering.” From 1978 to 1984, Dr. Bejan was an assistant and associate professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He joined Duke University in Durham, NC, as a full professor of mechanical engineering with tenure in 1984 and was appointed J.A. Jones Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering in 1989.
Dr. Bejan is recognized with Honorary Membership in ASME for an extraordinary record of creative work, including the unification of thermodynamics and heat transfer, the conceptual development of design as a science that unites all fields, legendary contributions to engineering education and, since 1996, the discovery and continued development of the constructal law. He has pioneered numerous original methods in thermodynamics, such as entropy generation minimization, scale analysis of convection, heatlines and masslines, and the constructal law of design and evolution in nature.
Dr. Bejan is the author of more than 530 peer-reviewed journal articles, and 25 books including Design in Nature with J. Peder Zane (Doubleday, 2012), Shape and Structure, From Engineering to Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2000), Constructal Theory of Social Dynamics with Gilbert W. Merkx (Springer, 2007), and Design with Constructal Theory with Sylvie Lorente (Wiley, 2008). Three of his books, used as textbooks in universities around the world, are in their third edition—Advanced Engineering Thermodynamics (Wiley, 2006), Convection Heat Transfer (Wiley, 2004), and Convection in Porous Media with Donald Nield (Springer, 2006). Dr. Bejan is ranked by Thomson Reuters (formerly ISI) among the hundred most-cited authors in all engineering.
Dr. Bejan has pioneered numerous original methods in thermodynamics and heat transfer.
A Fellow of ASME, Dr. Bejan has presented papers, organized and chaired numerous conference sessions, edited several proceedings, and was associate editor of the Journal of Heat Transfer. He served on a number of Heat Transfer Division committees and was a member of the Advanced Energy Systems Division’s Systems Analysis Technical Committee. Dr. Bejan was honored with the Society’s Gustus L. Larson Memorial Award (1988), the James Harry Potter Gold Medal (1990), the Heat Transfer Memorial Award–Science (1994), the Worcester Reed Warner Medal (1996), the Charles Russ Richards Memorial Award (2001), and the Edward F. Obert Award (2004).
He is a member of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE). Dr. Bejan received the Max Jakob Memorial Award (1999) from ASME and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), ASEE’s Ralph Coats Roe Award (2000), the Luikov Medal (2006) and James P. Harnett Memorial Award (2007) from the International Centre for Heat and Mass Transfer, and the Donald Q. Kern Award (2008) from AIChE.
He holds 16 honorary doctorates from universities in 11 countries including the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (2003) and the Sapienza University of Rome (2009).
Dr. Bejan has pioneered numerous original methods in thermodynamics, such as entropy generation minimization, scale analysis of convection, heatlines and masslines, and the constructal law of design and evolution in nature.
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