Professor Masahiro Kawaji on His 65th Birthday

Abstract

Professor Masahiro KawajiProfessor Masahiro Kawaji is one of the well-known names in the field of nuclear engineering and two-phase flow. He was born on Sept. 6, 1954 in Kagoshima, Japan. He received his B.A.Sc. in 1978 from University of Toronto, Canada and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 1979 and 1984, respectively, in nuclear engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, CA. His Ph.D. thesis title was entitled “Transient non-equilibrium two-phase flow: Reflooding of a vertical flow channel”1 under the supervision of Professor Sanjoy Banerjee.After finishing his Ph.D. in 1984, Professor Masahiro Kawaji returned to Japan where he worked there for a short time in the Department of Reactor Safety Research, Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI), Tokai-mura, Japan. In 1986, he joined the Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry at the University of Toronto, Canada. He taught there until 2014, and became Professor Emeritus there. During his work at the University of Toronto, Professor Kawaji was involved in many activities. For example, in 1999, he was among the founding members of the Ice Slurry Working Group of the International Institute of Refrigeration (IIR). In 2002, the working group was broadened to Phase Change Materials and Slurries and in 2005 he co-edited the IIR Handbook on Ice Slurries [1] with Professors Michael Kauffeld and Peter Egolf. In June 2005, he hosted the ASME Third International Conference on Microchannels, and Minichannels (ICMM2005) at the University of Toronto. This was the first ICMM held the outside USA after ICMM2003 and ICMM2004 were held in Rochester, New York. After ICMM2005, the conference name was changed to International Conference on Nanochannels, Microchannels, and Minichannels (ICNMM) in order to also include nanochannels. In ICMM2005, over 250 persons attended the conference and 190 papers were presented. The participants included researchers from several different fields such as fluid flow, heat transfer, biofluidics, microTAS, microfluidics, molecular dynamics, and lab-on-chip. A special issue of Selected Papers from ICMM2005 was published in Heat Transfer Engineering Journal by the guest editor, Professor Satish G. Kandlikar [2].