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Senior Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Affairs, Davies Family Provostial Professor, and Professor, by courtesy, of Materials Science and Engineering

Kenneth Goodson

Senior Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Affairs, Davies Family Provostial Professor, and Professor, by courtesy, of Materials Science and Engineering
Ken Goodson is the Senior Associate Dean for Research & Faculty Affairs in the School of Engineering. As Mechanical Engineering Chair & Vice Chair (2008-2019), he led two strategic plans and recruited 15 faculty who transformed the department's scholarship and diversity.

Goodson specializes in heat transfer and energy conversion with applications to electric vehicles, data centers, and power electronics. His group has a track record of translating breakthrough thermal science to industrial practice with decades of support from NSF, DARPA, DOE, ARPA-E, ONR, AFOSR, and SRC. Under the DARPA ICECool Programs, his team developed a world-record heat sink for power conversion. Goodson has 35 patents, is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow with the National Academy of Inventors, and co-founded Cooligy, which built heat sinks for Apple and was acquired by Emerson.

Goodson’s 50+ PhD alums include dozens of faculty at MIT, Stanford, Princeton, UC Berkeley, and other schools as well as senior leadership at ARPA-E, Sandia Labs, and tech companies. He is a Fellow with AAAS, ASME, IEEE, and APS. He received the ASME Kraus Medal and Memorial Award, the IEEE Richard Chu Award, the AIChE Kern Award, and the SRC Aristotle Award for mentoring graduate students.

Goodson moonlights as a baritone oratorio soloist with appearances at Davies Symphony Hall and the Bing Concert Hall. He held voice fellowships at the Tanglewood Music Festival and received the Sudler Prize for Arts Achievement. His wife, Laura Dahl, is a concert pianist with the Stanford music faculty.

Education

PhD ME, MIT (1993)
MSME, MIT. ONR Graduate Fellow (1991)
BSME, MIT. Tau Beta Pi, Pi Tau Sigma (1989)
BS Humanities, MIT. Phi Beta Kappa. Sudler Prize (1989)