Introduction
thermalHUB.org is an evolving web resource and the subject of a new project funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to define the elements of a cyberinfrastructure initiative that will serve the global heat transfer community. In Summer 2007, nearly twenty members of the heat transfer community (see below) collaborated on a successful proposal to the NSF to obtain a two-year planning grant that will support the definition and development of a wide range of innovative cyberinfrastructure resources for the heat transfer community. These resources will be consolidated through this thermalHUB.org web portal, whose basic structure is modeled after the successful nanoHUB.org implementation.
We are now in the planning stage of this exciting resource, and we are reaching out to the global heat transfer community to define the needs and opportunities that cyberinfrastructure might address for our field. As the first major step in this process, a community workshop was held for two days (10-11 December 2007) on Purdue’s campus (West Lafayette, IN USA) to plan the initial prototype implementation of thermalHUB. The discussions focused on defining an initial set of innovative cyberinfrastructure resources for our community, and the report from the workshop is now available online. 
These resources will be developed to be rich in content and useful in the activities of heat transfer students and practitioners from all backgrounds. Please visit this site regularly as new resources are posted. We welcome the community’s input and contributions to thermalHUB as this initiative moves forward.
thermalHUB Mission Statement
The mission of thermalHUB is to serve the heat transfer community by providing convenient global access to comprehensive, state-of-the-art information, computing, and communications resources that: (a) enhance the efficiency and accuracy of research studies on all types of thermal transport processes across all relevant length and time scales, (b) enable continuous learning by sharing best practices and learning tools with the broad community, from students to experienced engineers and scientists.
Coordinating Committee
The thermalHUB Coordinating Committee consists of an Executive Committee and an Advisory Board, with the following members.
Executive Committee, structured according to the major elements of thermalHUB
- Director: Tim Fisher (Purdue)
- Cyberinfrastructure: Michael McLennan (Software Architect of nanoHUB)
- Computational Research Tools: Jennifer Lukes (Penn)
- Computational Learning Tools: Jayathi Murthy (Purdue)
- Online Lectures and Tutorials: Costas Grigoropoulos (UC-Berkeley)
- Community Wiki: D. Greg Walker (Vanderbilt)
- Properties Database & Experimental Network: Li Shi (UT-Austin)
- International Partnerships: Pinar Menguc (Kentucky)
- Industrial Partnerships: Suresh Garimella (Purdue)
Advisory Board
- Prof. Cristina Amon: Member of the US National Academy of Engineering and Dean of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto
- Prof. Faruk Arinç: Secretariat of ICHMT and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey
- Richard Chu: Member of the US National Academy of Engineering and IBM Fellow
- Dr. Rodney Douglass: Chair of the Heat Transfer Division of ASME and Member of the Technical Staff at Los Alamos National Laboratory
- Prof. Yogesh Jaluria: Editor of the Journal of Heat Transfer, and Board of Governors Professor and Chair of the Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering at Rutgers University
- Prof. Sangtae Kim: Member of the US National Academy of Engineering and Feddersen Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University
- Prof. Mark Lundstrom: Director of the NSF Network for Computational Nanotechnology and Scifres Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University
- Prof. W. Gerry McCartney: Vice President for Information Technology, Chief Information Officer, and Professor of Management at Purdue University
- Prof. Raymond Viskanta: Member of the US National Academy of Engineering and emeritus Goss Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University
NSF Proposal Team
- Gang Chen (MIT)
- Chris Dames (UC-Riverside)
- Andrei Fedorov (GaTech)
- Timothy Fisher (Purdue)
- Suresh Garimella (Purdue)
- Costas Grigoropoulos (UC-Berkeley)
- Scott Huxtable (VaTech)
- Deyu Li (Vanderbilt)
- Jennifer Lukes (UPenn)
- Arun Majumdar (UC-Berkeley)
- Michael McLennan (Purdue)
- Pinar Menguc (Kentucky)
- Jayathi Murthy (Purdue)
- Laurent Pilon (UCLA)
- Xiulin Ruan (Purdue)
- Li Shi (UT-Austin)
- Raymond Viskanta (Purdue)
- Greg Walker (Vanderbilt)
- Xianfan Xu (Purdue)