An engineering professor from the University of Illinois at Chicago will lecture on fluid, thermal and energy research on Thursday, April 20, at the NIU College of Engineering and Engineering Technology in Sycamore.

The lecture will be held in conference room 187 at 2 p.m.

James Hartnett, director of the Energy Resources Center at UIC, has received national and international awards for his contributions to heat transfer in liquid metals and mass transfer cooling.

Hartnett has published more than 100 papers, and more than 12 doctoral theses have been completed under his supervision.

Hartnett and Parviz Payvar, chairman of mechanical engineering at NIU, received their doctorate degrees from the University of California at Berkeley, under the same adviser.

M. Kostic, professor of mechanical engineering at NIU, has joined Hartnett in research and also has worked with Hartnett in the past.

Hartnett celebrated his 65th birthday in March. He works with Argonne National Laboratories in Argonne, Illinois, and was one of the founding members of the International Center for Heat and Mass Transfer.

He has served as visiting professor at the University of Tokyo, the University of Alexandria and the Israel Institute of Technology.

He has been active in the Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, American Society of Mechanical Engineers and NASA, which Kostic said are the largest sources of funding for NIU’s department of mechanical engineering.

Hartnett received his bachelor’s degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology, a master’s degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley.

He has served on educational research committees in the Soviet Union, Korea, Thailand and Romania.