Professor Agonafer earned his PhD at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan fellowship, Graduate Engineering Minority Fellowship, and NSF Center of Advanced Materials for Purification of Water with Systems (WaterCAMPWS). After his PhD,  Damena joined Professor Ken Goodson’s Nanoheat lab as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Stanford University. Prior to joining University of Maryland, Damena was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Washington University in Saint Louis. He is a recipient of the Google Research Award, Sloan Research Fellowship Award, Cisco Research Award, NSF CAREER Award, ASME Early Career award, and ASME K-16 Outstanding Early Faculty Career in Thermal Management Award. He was also one of 85 early-career engineers in the US selected to attend the 2021 National Academy of Engineering’s 26th annual US Frontiers of Engineering symposium.