Professor Wenquan Tao is a Professor at the School of Energy and Power Engineering at Xi’an Jiaotong University, specialising in engineering thermophysics. He graduated from Xi'an Jiaotong University in 1962. He then pursued graduate studies in heat transfer under Professor Shiming Yang at Xi’an Jiaotong University. Upon completion of graduate studies in 1966, Professor Tao joined the academic staff of his alma mater. From 1980 to 1982, Professor Tao was a visiting scholar at the Heat Transfer Laboratory at the University of Minnesota, conducting research on heat transfer enhancement and numerical simulation under the supervision of Professor Ephraim Maurice Sparrow.
Professor Tao’s honours and awards include the inaugural National Teaching Master Award (2003); the Second Prize of the National Natural Science Award (2004); the Second Prize of the National Technological Invention Award (2009); election as a Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2005); the Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation Award for Scientific and Technological Progress (2006); the National Science and Technology Progress Award (Innovation Team) (2017, as the first awardee); the Special Prize (1989) and First Prize (2018) of the National Teaching Achievement Award, as a first awardee for both; and the Shaanxi Province Highest Science and Technology Achievement Award (2018).
Professor Tao has published more than 500 papers in international journals and has an H-index of 101 (Scopus). Both editions of his monograph Numerical Heat Transfer have each been cited over 20,000 times both domestically and internationally. He has supervised more than 150 graduate students through to degree completion. His current research interests include multiscale numerical simulation methods for heat transfer and fluid flow, and their applications; key scientific and technological issues and engineering applications of hydrogen fuel cells; energy-efficient cooling technologies for data centres; and micro- and nanoscale heat transfer and new energy applications.
