Cristina Amon

Education

She received her Mechanical Engineering diploma degree from Simón Bolívar University in 1981 and after two years of engineering practice and teaching, continued her education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she earned her MS and ScD degrees in 1985 and 1988, respectively.

Research, teaching and administration

Amon joined the Carnegie Mellon University in 1988 as an assistant professor in mechanical engineering. She was promoted to associate professor in 1993, and became a full professor in 1997. In 1998, she was named the Associate Director, Institute for Complex Engineered Systems, and become Director in 1999. She became the Raymond J. Lane Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering in 2001.

Professor Amon’s research pioneered the development of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for formulating and solving thermal design problems subject to multidisciplinary competing constraints. This led to her creation of a multi-stage concurrent thermal design methodology based on hierarchical model refinement, which combines CFD, non-deterministic experiments and Bayesian statistics. Her research has advanced the scientific foundation of heat transfer enhancement by flow destabilization and hemodynamics mass transport in biological systems including aortic aneurysms and intravenous blood oxygenators. She has made pioneering contributions to concurrent thermal designs, innovation in electronics cooling and transient thermal management of wearable computers. More recently, her research group has been focused on developing numerical algorithms for sub-micron and nano-scale heat transport in semiconductors (molecular dynamics, lattice-Boltzmann method and phonon Boltzmann transport). To disseminate these results, she has been invited to deliver keynote lectures worldwide. She has contributed twelve book chapters, one McGraw Hill custom textbook, and over 250 refereed articles in education and research literature.

Her appointment as Dean began in 2006. She was appointed as Alumni Chair Professor in BioEngineering at the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at University of Toronto at the same time.

Her achievements in education cover the whole spectrum of integrating education, research and engineering practice. Dedicated to outreach, she co-developed Engineering Your Future, the Society of Women Engineers workshop for female and minority high school students, and Moving 4th into Engineering, an outreach program targeted toward fourth graders. Other major projects include the development of the Identity, Privacy and Security Institute, which works in collaboration with policymakers, regulatory agencies and industry, plus multidisciplinary centres in sustainable energy and global engineering.

Honors and awards

Amon holds a number of honors and awards. Amon is a life fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and American Society of Mechanical Engineers. She is a fellow of the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering, American Society for Engineering Education, and Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. She received several awards from the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), including the prestigious 1997 George Westinghouse and 2002 Ralph Coats Roe Awards. In 2003, she received the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Education Award and, in 2005, she was named one of America’s most important Hispanics in technology and business. In 2015, Amon received the Ontario Professional Engineers Gold Medal from Professional Engineers Ontario and the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers

Her editorship roles include the ASME Journal of Heat Transfer, IEEE Transactions on Components and Packaging Technology, and Heat and Mass Transfer.