John Lienhard

Bio

John H. Lienhard V is Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Water and Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Since joining the MIT faculty in 1988, Lienhard’s research and educational efforts have focused on water purification and desalination, heat and mass transfer, and thermodynamics. He has also filled a number of administrative roles at MIT.

Lienhard received his bachelor's degree (summa cum laude) and master's degree in thermal engineering at UCLA from the Chemical, Nuclear, and Thermal Engineering Department, where he worked on thermal instabilities in solar collectors and evaporating meniscus measurements for desalination systems. He joined MIT immediately after completing his PhD in the Applied Mechanics and Engineering Science Department at UC San Diego, where he had done wind tunnel measurements of spectra and cospectra in thermally stratified turbulent flow, with application to oceanic and atmospheric transport.

At MIT, Lienhard has worked on desalination processes, liquid jet impingement, high-heat-flux engineering, electronics thermal management, and other topics. His research in desalination includes humidification-dehumidification desalination, membrane distillation desalination, forward and reverse osmosis, fouling and scale formation, electrodialysis, nanofiltration, management of high salinity brines, solar-driven desalination, thermodynamic and energy efficiency analysis of desalination cycles, and resource recovery. Lienhard has directly supervised more than 90 PhD and masters theses. He is the author of more than 300 peer-reviewed papers and has been issued more than 40 US patents, most of which have been commercialized through start-up companies. 

In 2014, Lienhard founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab at MIT (J-WAFS), and he directed the lab until 2025. J-WAFS supports water- and food-related research that addresses the needs of a growing and urbanizing population on a warming planet. Under his leadership, J-WAFS awarded research grants of more than $25 million at MIT, supporting more than 400 MIT researchers. In addition to scientific research, a dozen new companies were spun-out of J-WAFS.

Lienhard is an Honorary Member and Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Fellow of the American Society of Thermal and Fluid Engineers. He received the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Desalination and Reuse Association, the 2022 AIChE Donald Q. Kern Award (for expertise in heat transfer, transport phenomena, and energy conversion), the 2019 ASME Edward F. Obert Award (in thermodynamics), the 2015 ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award, and the 2012 ASME Technical Communities Globalization Medal.  He was also a recipient of the 1988 National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award and the 1992 SAE Ralph R. Teetor Award. 

Lienhard is the co-author of textbooks on heat transfer, on thermal modeling, and on measurement and instrumentation. His heat transfer book has been available online at no charge since 2002, and hundreds of thousands of copies have been downloaded worldwide. This book was among the very first engineering textbooks distributed in pdf format. His measurements book has sold more than 130,000 copies. He created new graduate courses on desalination, on thermal modeling, and on compressible fluid mechanics. He has also received five teaching and mentoring awards at MIT. 

Lienhard was the Director of the Rohsenow Kendall Heat Transfer Laboratory from 1997 to 2025. He directed the Center for Clean Water and Clean Energy from 2008 to 2017, and he directed the Ibn Khaldun Fellowship for Saudi Arabian Women from 2009 to 2017.

Lienhard holds Professional Engineering licenses in Massachusetts and Vermont.