|
 |
Damena Agonafer (center) is a Clark Faculty Fellow at the University of Maryland’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. Photo credit: Milana Braslavsky Photography.
|
|
Damena Agonafer, Clark Faculty Fellow and associate professor at the University of Maryland (UMD) Department of Mechanical Engineering, has won a pitch competition with his proposal for reducing the amount of heat produced by data centers.
It is the second award Agonafer has earned in recent months for work in this area. In October, a research team he leads netted a Best Paper award at the Open Compute Project Global Summit’s Future Technologies Symposium.
The pitch competition was organized by the Vicinity Ideation Program, a partnership between Boston-based Vicinity Energy and the Maryland Energy Innovation Accelerator that seeks to foster new approaches to clean heating and urban decarbonization. At its culminating event on Feb. 6, Agonafer landed the top prize for technology he and his team are developing at his Nanoscale Energy Interfacial Transport Lab.
Data centers generate massive amounts of heat, with some advanced AI clusters reaching 150 kw. Even comparably small centers create more heat than hundreds of homes combined. Agonafer, whose work is funded in part through a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E COOLERCHIPS program, aims to rein in those amounts by eliminating energy-hungry heat pumps, instead applying a heat-absorbing liquid directly to chip interfaces.
The captured heat can then be repurposed for residential and commercial purposes, using heat exchanges.
Agonafer is one of several UMD Department of Mechanical Engineering faculty members who are involved with the COOLERCHIPS program, including Interim Chair F. Patrick McCluskey and professors Michael Ohadi and Peter Sandborn. The program, launched in 2022, is a major federal endeavor aimed at meeting the energy and sustainability challenges presented by data centers and AI.
A member of the UMD faculty since 2022, Agonafer was awarded a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in January 2025. He is also an NSF CAREER Award recipient. In addition to his work on interface cooling, Agonafer co-leads an NSF-funded Engineering Research Center focused on the development of improved Heating, Ventilation. Air Conditioning, and Refrigeration systems.
February 16, 2026
|
