We are proud to share that NEIT Lab’s Roshith Mittakolu and his collaborators received two awards at ITherm 2026 in Orlando, Florida: the Prof. Avram Bar-Cohen Best Paper Award in the System Level Thermal Management track and the Best E-Poster Award in the System Level and Data Center Thermal Management track.

Their paper, “Towards 1 MW Data Center Racks: System-Level Modeling of a Membrane-Assisted Two-Phase Cooling Architecture,” was authored by Roshith Mittakolu, Ibaad Gandikota, Damena Agonafer, Patrick McCluskey, and Saeed Moghaddam. The work brings together researchers from the University of Maryland and the University of Florida to investigate cooling architectures for high-power data center racks.

At UMD, Roshith has been developing MOSTCOOL, a two-phase flow network modeling framework for rack-level cooling, under the guidance of Professors Damena Agonafer and Patrick McCluskey. This collaboration applies MOSTCOOL to membrane-assisted heat sink technology developed by Professor Saeed Moghaddam’s group at the University of Florida, connecting component-level innovation with system-level modeling.

The project highlights the collaborative opportunities supported by the ARPA-E COOLERCHIPS program and advances research toward thermal management solutions for next-generation data centers and AI infrastructure. Receiving both awards at his first ITherm presentation marks a special milestone in Roshith’s Ph.D. journey.

Congratulations to Roshith and the entire research team on this recognition! We look forward to their continued contributions to advanced cooling technologies.