Dr. Renkun Chen is an Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Materials Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. He received his B.S. degree in Engineering Thermo-physics from Tsinghua University in 2004, and Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008. Following a one-year stint as a postdoctoral fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, he joined the faculty of UC San Diego in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in 2009. His research group is interested in fundamental micro- and nano- scale heat transfer as well as engineering applications of heat transfer in various energy systems. He has authored and co-authored over 50 papers in the broad areas of thermal energy transport, conversion, and management. In the solar-thermal energy domain, his group has been working on several projects supported by the Department of Energy to develop and characterize high-temperature materials being considered for next-generation solar-thermal systems.