Rama Venkatasubramanian

Dr. Rama Venkatasubramanian is the chief technologist for the thermoelectrics area in the Research and Exploratory Development Department and the team leader for energy and thermal management. He leads a team whose work focuses on developing advanced solid-state energy conversion materials and devices for power generation, refrigeration, thermal management, and wearable applications. He is known for pioneering atomically engineered superlattice materials and other nanoscale thermoelectric device innovations for a range of applications (Nature, 2001; Nature Nanotechnology, 2009; Nature Biomedical Engineering, 2023; Nature Communications, 2025). Dr. Venkatasubramanian is a Fellow of the IEEE, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Johns Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute (HEMI). He served as an editor for IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices from 2011 to 2020. He is currently a specialty chief editor for thermoelectric cooling and energy-harvesting materials at Frontiers in Electronic Materials. He has 27 issued U.S. patents, is the author or coauthor of over 149 peer-reviewed journal articles and conference publications, and has edited or contributed to six book chapters. Dr. Venkatasubramanian has received four R&D 100 Awards (2002, 2010, 2023, 2025) for nano-engineered thermoelectric materials, device advancement for electronics hot-spot cooling, prosthetics/haptics, and refrigeration applications. His areas of expertise include nano-engineered thin-film thermoelectric materials and devices, 2D materials, electronics and photonics thermal management, thermoelectric devices for outer-planetary missions and satellite applications, energy harvesting and cooling devices for haptics to hypersonic systems, cryogenic and biomedical device applications, multi-junction photovoltaic devices, optoelectronics, radiovoltaics, and related semiconductor materials and devices.