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 teaching have been in thermal science and engineering, including heat and mass transfer, water purification and desalination, and thermodynamics. He has also filled a number of administrative roles at MIT.  He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering.

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 completed his PhD in 1988 in the Applied Mechanics and Engineering Science Department at UC San Diego, where he had measured turbulence spectra and cospectra in thermally stratified air 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 has included a variety of technologies, spanning thermal desalination, membrane desalination and electrodialysis, management of high salinity brines, thermodynamic efficiency analysis of desalination cycles, and resource recovery. Lienhard has directly supervised more than 100 doctoral and master's theses. He is the author of more than 300 peer-reviewed papers and holds more than 40 US patents. Start-ups from his group include Gradiant Corporation, Sandymount Technologies, and Harmony Desalting.

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. is heat transfer book has been available online at no charge since 2002 (ahtt.mit.edu).
This book was among the earliest engineering textbooks distributed in PDF format, and by 2012 more than 250,000 downloads had been logged.  His measurements book has sold more than 100,000 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.  He was the founding director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab at MIT (J-WAFS) from 2014 until 2025. During his time, J-WAFS provided more than $25 million to water- and food-related research projects, fellowships, and commericalization efforts, funding work in more than 40 departments, labs, and centers. He also directed the Ibn Khaldun Fellowship for Saudi Arabian Women from 2009 to 2017.

Lienhard holds Professional Engineering licenses in Massachusetts and Vermont.