Dr. Cynthia Hipwell from the J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University recently received the 2021 Robert Henry Thurston Lecture Award from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).
Established in 1925, this prestigious award provides an outstanding leader in pure or applied science or engineering with the honor of presenting to ASME a lecture on a subject of broad interest to engineers. She will present “Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR): A Nanoscale Heat Transfer Adventure” to the society on Jan. 21, 2022.
“I am excited to share the story of heat-assisted magnetic recording technology with the next generation of mechanical engineers,” said Hipwell. “My advisor, Chang-Lin Tien, presented the Thurston Lecture in 1993, encouraging the mechanical engineering community to ‘go to extremes’ and explore the new area of nanoscale heat transfer. It is a huge honor and extremely meaningful for me to be presenting this lecture 28 years later about a technology made possible by the very nanoscale heat-transfer research that he encouraged us to pursue.”
Hipwell is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Inventors and the Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas. She is a technology and business process innovator with more than 20 years of experience leading engineering, research and product development.
Hipwell is known for establishing new business processes and an organizational culture that focuses on developing innovative solutions from root cause understanding, improved pace of learning and discipline in experimentation. Her research interests include nanoscale energy transport and tribology of small-scale devices, surface interface physics and sensors and actuators for haptic and human/machine interfaces, and innovation business processes.