Special Issue: Ernest G. Cravalho Memorial Issue

Abstract

This special issue of the Journal of Heat Transfer is presented as a memorial to Professor Ernest George Cravalho who passed away on April 13, 2021, at the age of 82. His career spanned 44 years on the faculty of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at M.I.T. where he established an exceptional legacy as a teacher, mentor, administrator, and researcher who was a distinguished pioneer in establishing the field of biomedical heat transfer. Ernie came to M.I.T. in 1967 after completing all three of his degrees at the University of California at Berkeley, with his Ph.D. in radiation effects at cryogenic temperatures. He was supervised by the eminent heat transfer scholar Professor Chang-Lin Tien who subsequently became Chancellor of UC Berkeley. Professor Tien advised Ernie, as he was setting out to build his career, that there were ripe opportunities for an engineer to make important contributions using cryogenic heat transfer principles and technology in biomedical applications. Upon arriving at M.I.T. Ernie was assigned to the Cryogenic Engineering Laboratory directed by Professor J.L. Smith where he worked with his first doctoral student (KRD) to follow Professor Tien's advice. At the time this was surely a novel direction to take for establishing a research career, but Prof. Smith was strong in his support of Ernie's novel endeavors. Many of the established engineering faculty at M.I.T. took a dim view of attempting to apply engineering analysis methods to living systems, plus some of the established leaders in the field of cryobiology were not welcoming to engineers invading their domain of expertise and predicted failure for this initiative.