Frank Kreith

Professor Frank Kreith was born on December 15, 1922 in Vienna, Austria and came to the US in 1940. He is an internationally known energy consultant and Professor Emeritus of Engineering at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In 1945, after graduation from UC Berkeley, he accepted a position at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology, where he developed a heat transfer laboratory and conducted research on building heat transfer. He received his MS in Engineering in 1949 from UCLA, and in 1950 was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to Princeton University, followed in 1951 by an appointment to the faculty of the UC Berkeley. From 1953-1959, he was Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Lehigh University, where he did research on heat transfer in rotating systems and wrote the first edition of Principles of Heat Transfer, now in its seventh edition. In 1959, he joined the University of Colorado as Professor of Mechanical and Chemical Engineering. In 1962, he published a text on the design of solar power plants based on his consulting for the NASA space program. During his time at the University of Colorado, he researched heat transfer in biological systems and renewable energy. In 1964 he was awarded a Doctorate in Engineering from the University of Paris. He served as Chief Scientist and ASME Legislative Fellow at the National Conference of State Legislatures from 1988-2001, providing professional advice and assistance to all 50 state legislatures on energy and the environment. Prior to joining NCSL, he was Senior Research Fellow at the Solar Energy Research Institute (now the National Renewable Energy Laboratory). Dr. Kreith has been an energy consultant to NATO, the U.S. Agency of International Development, and the UN. He has published over 120 peer-reviewed technical articles and more than 15 books, most notably Principles of Heat Transfer (now in its 7th edition), CRC Handbook of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, and Principles of Sustainable Energy. Kreith's work has received worldwide recognition, including the Washington Award, Charles Greeley Abbot Award from ASES, the Max Jacob Award from ASME-AIChE, and the Ralph Coats Roe Medal from ASME for "significant contributions...through provision of information to legislators about energy and the environment." In 2004, ASME recognized his lifelong contributions to heat transfer and renewable energy by establishing the Frank Kreith Energy Award