John H. Lienhard V is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor and the founding Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab at MIT (J-WAFS). During thirty-five years on the MIT faculty, Lienhard’s research and educational efforts have focused on heat and mass transfer, water purification and desalination, and thermodynamics. As Director of J-WAFS, he coordinates MIT’s research in food security and water supply for a growing population on a changing planet.

Lienhard received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in thermal engineering at UCLA and his PhD in environmental fluid dynamics at UC San Diego. His research on water purification has included humidification-dehumidification desalination, membrane distillation, forward and reverse osmosis, nanofiltration, electrodialysis, solar-driven desalination, solvent extraction, bubble columns, management of high salinity brines, and energy efficiency analysis of desalination cycles. He has directly supervised 100 graduate theses and postdoctoral associates and is author of more than 300 peer-reviewed publications. He has been issued 38 US patents, and he is a co-founder of the international water treatment company, Gradiant Corporation.

Lienhard is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), a Fellow of the American Society of Thermal and Fluid Engineers (ASTFE), and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is a recipient of the 1988 National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, the 1992 SAE Teetor Award, the 2012 ASME Technical Communities Globalization Medal, and the 2015 ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award, and the 2019 ASME Edward F. Obert Award. Lienhard is the author of textbooks on heat transfer, on measurement and instrumentation, and on thermal modeling, and he is a registered professional engineer in Massachusetts and Vermont.