Dr. Aaron P. Wemhoff

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Aaron Wemhoff was born in 1978 in Omaha, NE. As an infant his family moved to Raleigh, NC, where he lived to the age of 16. After two years at Wake Forest-Rolesville High School in Wake Forest, NC, his family moved to Herndon, VA, where he graduated from Herndon High School in 1996. Aaron attended the University of Virginia from 1996-2000, where he was president of the Virginia Chapter of the Alpha Delta Phi Fraternity. He also founded a charity 5-k fun run at UVa that benefitted the Epilepsy Foundation of Virginia. In May 2000, he obtained a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering with distinction. During the summer and winter breaks of his undergraduate years, he interned at Dominion Consulting Engineers, P. C., an HVAC/plumbing/electrical design firm that works on commercial building systems.

Aaron attended graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley from 2000-2004. During his graduate years, his research was performed under the advisement of Dr. Van P. Carey, a world-renowned expert in thermodynamics and phase-change heat transfer. He originally arrived at Berkeley with co-advisement by Dr. Carey and Dr. Chang-Lin Tien, the former university Chancellor and first Asian-American Chancellor of a major research university in the United States. Dr. Tien subsequently fell ill and passed away during Dr. Wemhoff's time at Berkeley, making him one of the last in a long list of students recruited for Dr. Tien's group. He also interned for two summers at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, CA. During his graduate school years he was the Advertising Chair for the university's Graduate Social Club.

Dr. Wemhoff worked for three years and six months at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, CA, after obtaining the doctorate. His position as a staff engineer for the Thermal-Fluids Group in the Engineering Technology Division allowed him to gain expertise in computational analysis and code development. He also gained the advantage of working with teams of Chemists, Chemical Engineers, and Physicists on thermal cookoff prediction. Dr. Wemhoff was also heavily involved in LLNL's event for National Engineers Week, where he was Vice Chair in 2007 and Chair in 2008.  He also provided a couple hundred hours of service to Habitat for Humanity East Bay over his last three years in California.

Dr. Wemhoff started work with the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Villanova University in 2008 with the founding of the Multiscale System Analysis Laboratory (MSAL).  He first developed the code Molecular Dynamics for Arbitrary Geometries (MDAG) as a state-of-the art research tool for investigation of nanosystems and for teaching graduate students the finer points of code development, including structured code environments, linked-lists, code repositories, and parallel debugging. He has subsequently developed the Lumped HVAC code (L-HVAC) that was initiated at the Philadelphia site of the Naval Surface Warfare Center - Carderock Division (NSWCCD) through an ASEE-ONR Summer Faculty Fellowship. He has also spent time at Purdue University while on sabbatical in Fall 2011.  Later, Dr. Wemhoff initiated and currently acts as chief developer of the Villanova Thermodynamic Analysis of Systems (VTAS) multiphysics data center flow network modeling tool, funded through the Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) in Energy-Smart Electronic Systems (ES2).  Dr. Wemhoff serves as chair of the ASME K-20 Committee on Computational Heat Transfer and is also on the executive board of the Philadelphia Section of ASME.

Dr. Wemhoff currently resides in Media, PA with his wife Teresa and his son Griffin. His parents Bill and Kathy Wemhoff live in Herndon, VA.  He has an older sister, Jennifer, who lives in Oak Park, IL with her husband Brian (a professor at Northwestern) and their two children Sadie and Linus. His younger brother Ryan and Ryan's wife Shannon live in Vienna, VA with their two children Lauren and Harrison.

Last updated July 2016