Recent News

On July 7th, 2024, several members of the NEIT Lab participated in the Northrop Grumman University Research Symposium held in Bethesda MD, showcasing their latest research through poster presentations. Representing the lab were Kidus Guye, Vivek Manepalli, Roshith Mittakolu, Alexander Lyons, Iman Louise, and Giovanina Bell. This opportunity came through our ongoing collaboration with Northrop […]

On June 5th, 2024, the NEIT Lab at the University of Maryland had the privilege of hosting Dr. Laurent Pilon, Program Manager at ARPA-E, and his colleague Dr. Thomas Bress. Dr. Pilon is overseeing our COOLERCHIPS project, and the visit was aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of our ongoing work in direct-to-chip evaporative cooling

We are excited to share that Dr. Damena Agonafer, Principal Investigator of the NEIT Lab, and Ph.D. student Vivek Manepalli have been awarded the 2025 Invention of the Year at Innovate Maryland, the University of Maryland’s annual celebration of research and innovation. They were recognized for their groundbreaking invention, done in collaboration with Northrop-Grumman: an

The NEIT Lab at the University of Maryland proudly participated in the 2025 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit in Washington, D.C., showcasing two breakthrough technologies developed under the ARPA-E COOLERCHIPS program. The Summit brought together top researchers, industry leaders, and policymakers to accelerate the commercialization of transformative energy technologies. As part of a collaborative effort with

The NEIT Lab proudly announces that its PI, Professor Damena Agonafer, has been awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) for 2025. This is the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on outstanding early-career scientists and engineers. This prestigious recognition underscores Professor Agonafer’s groundbreaking contributions to thermal fluid sciences, interfacial transport phenomena,

Prof. Damena Agonafer, Director of the NEIT Lab, was an invited speaker at the 12th International Conference of the Materials Research Society, held in Kigali, Rwanda. Prof. Agonafer’s talk, delivered as part of the Sustainable Electronics track, addressed the critical challenges in next-generation thermal management technologies for state-of-the-art GPUs and CPUs used in AI/ML workloads

Kidus Guye presented his work on designing and modeling a novel hollow micropillar evaporator for high AI/ML workloads in state-of-the-art data centers for low PUE two-phase cooling. This work is part of the ARPA-e COOLERCHIPS project geared towards developing next-generation liquid cooling technologies with significantly low junction-to-coolant thermal resistance, with PUE lower than 1.02. Also

Dr. Vivek Pandey joins the NEIT Lab as a PostDoc to primarily support the effort to develop evaporative cooling cold plates for data centers and also advise the graduate students on other two-phase cooling technologies. He brings extensive experience building hybrid-cooled data centers and heat sink topology optimization from the National University of Singapore. We

Exciting new paper about 3-component composite PCM. Results suggest these composites outperform pure copper in reducing peak device temperatures under transient heat loads, showing promise for efficient thermal management in electronics. Pre-released version can be found here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10477652