Research areas

Fluid dynamics; nano Scale thermal transport; energy; electronics cooling; hemodynamics and transport in biological systems; engineering design and education.

Laboratory: Advanced Thermal/fluid Optimization, Modelling and Simulation (ATOMS) Lab

Biosketch

Cristina H. Amon, a distinguished scholar in mechanical engineering and an innovative leader in higher education, became the 13th Dean of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto in 2006. She received her Mechanical Engineering diploma degree from Simón Bolívar University in 1981 and after two years of engineering practice and teaching, continued her education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she earned her MS and ScD degrees in 1985 and 1988, respectively. Prior to her appointment at the University of Toronto, she was the Raymond J. Lane Distinguished Professor and Director of the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems at Carnegie Mellon University.

Professor Amon’s research pioneered the development of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for formulating and solving thermal design problems subject to multidisciplinary competing constraints. This led to her creation of a multi-stage concurrent thermal design methodology based on hierarchical model refinement, which combines CFD, non-deterministic experiments and Bayesian statistics. Her research has advanced the scientific foundation of heat transfer enhancement by flow destabilization and hemodynamics mass transport in biological systems including aortic aneurysms and intravenous blood oxygenators. She has made pioneering contributions to concurrent thermal designs, innovation in electronics cooling and transient thermal management of wearable computers. More recently, her research group has been focused on developing numerical algorithms for sub-micron and nano-scale heat transport in semiconductors (molecular dynamics, lattice-Boltzmann method and phonon Boltzmann transport). To disseminate these results, she has been invited to deliver keynote lectures world wide. She has contributed twelve book chapters, one McGraw Hill custom textbook, and over 250 refereed articles in education and research literature.



Her achievements in education cover the whole spectrum of integrating education, research and engineering practice. Dedicated to outreach, she co-developed Engineering Your Future, the Society of Women Engineers workshop for female and minority high school students, and Moving 4th into Engineering, an outreach program targeted toward fourth graders.



Among her many awards and honors, she has been recognized by SWE as their Distinguished Engineering Educator in 1999 and Professor of the Year for 2000. Cristina Amon was the recipient of the Carnegie Mellon’s George Tallman Ladd Award for Excellence in Research in 1991 and the Benjamin Teare Award for Excellence in Engineering Education in 1998; the ASME Gustus Larson Memorial Award for outstanding achievements in 2000, and ASME Pittsburgh chapter Engineer of the Year in 1999; ASEE 1997 George Westinghouse and 2002 Ralph Coats Roe Awards; 2003 Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Education Award; ASME EPPD 2003 Electronics and Photonics Packaging Clock Award, 2004 Thermal Management Award, and 2008 Women Engineer Inaugural Award; she was named one of America’s most important Hispanics in technology and business.



Active in professional societies and executive boards, Cristina Amon has served the engineering profession with distinction and exceptional dedication; she is the Chair of the Global Engineering Deans Council and Director of the MKS Instruments Inc Board and the ASEE Engineering Deans Council Executive Board; she has served as ASME representative to AAAS, Chair of AAAS Engineering, and President of the SWE Pittsburgh Chapter; on NSF, NRC and NAE panels and external advisory boards at several universities, including Stanford University, the City University of New York, UCLA, University of Pennsylvania and University of Texas.



Cristina Amon is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and Fellow of AAAS, ASEE, ASME, CSME, CAE, EIC and IEEE. She was elected chair of IEEE/ASME ITherm 2002 Intersociety Conference on Thermal and Thermomechanical Phenomena in Electronic Systems and program chair of the 2005 ASME Heat Transfer conference. She served as ASME Heat Transfer Division Membership Recognition Committee Chair (1996-1998), K-3 Honors and Awards Committee Chair (2000-2001), K-16 HTD Electronics Cooling Committee Vice-Chair and Chair (1997-2003), Pi Tau Sigma faculty advisor (1994-1996), and ASEE campus representative (1993-1997). She is co-founder of Women In Non-traditional Graduate Studies (WINGS) and served as its first faculty adviser since its inception until 1992. Her editorship roles have included the ASME Journal of Heat Transfer, IEEE Transactions on Components and Packaging Technology, International Journal of Thermal Sciences, and Heat and Mass Transfer.