IML's Paper won the Prof. Avram Bar-Cohen Best Paper Award in the Data Centers Thermal Management track at 2026 IEEE ITherm

May 29, 2026 · 2 min read

Zheng is absolutely thrilled to share that our paper has won the prestigious Prof. Avram Bar-Cohen Best Paper Award in the Data Centers Thermal Management track at 2026 IEEE ITherm!

This is a massive milestone for me. Having started my journey as an Assistant Professor less than a year ago, this is the very first conference paper accepted with my student as the first author and I as corresponding author.

Huge congratulations to my Master’s student Shrenik Jadhav, who did a fantastic job since he joined my lab last September. He also presented this work at the conference, but he flew back this morning, and the award was announced shortly after during lunch. While he missed the stage moment, I was incredibly honored to step up and pick up the plaque on his behalf.

You can find our paper Machine Learning Guided Cooling System Optimization for Data Center on this site. If you are interested, we have more work on data center Modelica model-based co-design optimization you can check them out on our website.

Thank you to the IEEE Intersociety Conference on Thermal and Thermomechanical Phenomena in Electronic Systems committee and the reviewers for this incredible recognition, and to everyone who has supported our research group in this first year. We are just getting started!

Zheng Liu
Authors
Zheng Liu
Assistant Professor
Zheng Liu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2025. He received his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University in 2019. His research bridges theoretical and applied aspects of AI in manufacturing and energy systems. He focused on physics-based modeling, physics-informed machine learning, and generative design for manufacturing and energy storage applications. He also evaluated the manufacturing processes through life cycle assessment and techno-economic analysis, helping the team win $1M Department of Energy’s (DOE) inaugural American-Made Geothermal Lithium Extraction Prize. He has collaborated on multiple projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through the Future Manufacturing Research Grant (FMRG) program, as well as the Office of Naval Research (ONR). In addition, he served as a graduate fellow and STEM outreach coordinator at the NSF Engineering Research Center for Power Optimization for Electro-Thermal Systems (POETS). Zheng has received the Sharp Outstanding Graduate Student Award and the Tau Beta Pi Outstanding Graduate Student Award in recognition of his research contributions. He has published more than 20 peer-reviewed journal articles and 20 conference proceedings, and has served as the publication co-chair for the IEEE Transportation Electrification Conference. Through his work, he continues to push the frontiers of AI-driven innovation in manufacturing and energy systems.