Patrick E. Hopkins, Whitney Stone Professor of Engineering in the University of Virginia’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, has been elected to the rank of fellow by the council of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, one of the world’s premier scientific societies.
The rank is given to AAAS members “for meritorious contribution to the advancement of science and engineering,” according to the association.
“It’s national recognition for being a top scientist in engineering, and it’s humbling to be part of that cohort,” Hopkins said.
Hopkins’ election citation reads: “For excellence in research in energy transport and coupled photonic interactions with condensed matter, soft materials, liquids, vapors, plasmas and their interfaces.” He joins fellow UVA School of Engineering and Applied Science faculty members Sandhya Dwarkadas and Venkat Lakshmi in the newest class of AAAS fellows.
Patrick’s innovations in thermal conductivity testing and characterization of new materials influence many important research areas.
Hopkins is known for developing methods and instruments using powerful lasers to measure thermal conductivity: how energy moves through and interacts with materials in different states. He focuses on how heat and light behave at their boundaries — for instance, how temperature changes at interfaces between two different materials or states of matter.
Hopkins’ Experiments and Simulations in Thermal Engineering (ExSiTE) lab’s laser techniques are uniquely capable of characterizing these properties at the smallest time and space scales and at temperature poles — from deep-freeze cold to surface-of-the-sun hot. His work makes it possible to design new materials or electronic devices to perform under the most extreme conditions and temperatures, such as hypersonic flight, space travel or power-intensive computing applications.
“Patrick’s innovations in thermal conductivity testing and characterization of new materials influence many important research areas,” said Jennifer L. West, the Saunders Family Professor of Engineering and dean of UVA Engineering. “This latest recognition again shows the esteem he is held in by peers in multiple disciplines.”
Collaborations Lead to Career Success
Accolades for Hopkins came early and often, starting with young researcher awards from the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research in 2013. Those were followed by the nation’s highest such honor for young researchers, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, in 2013, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Bergles-Rohsenow Young Investigator Award in Heat Transfer in 2014.
Hopkins also was a 2014, 2022 and 2023 national finalist for the prestigious Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists. In 2021 he received the ASME Gustus L. Larson Memorial Award, a fellowship for experienced researchers. He has been a fellow of the ASME since 2019 and participated in the Defense Science Study Group from 2021 to 2024.
Our data [on Rolls Royce’s] new coating is going into decisions on what’s going to be in their engines. That’s super cool for me, and my students love it.
These accomplishments and more Hopkins achieved while on the UVA MAE faculty, where he has served since 2011. He also earned his bachelor’s degrees in mechanical engineering and physics at UVA, along with his Ph.D. in mechanical and aerospace engineering.
After graduating, Hopkins spent three years as the Harry S. Truman Postdoctoral Fellow at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico — an experience he says left him appreciating collaborative research environments like UVA’s.
He also was the Humboldt Research Fellow in Germany in 2021-22.
Entering mid-career, Hopkins is a prolific and highly cited researcher with 330 published papers. Developing other talented researchers contributes to that success. Researchers in his lab routinely publish papers, some as first authors, in high-impact scientific journals such as Nature.
His academic tree includes 12 Ph.D. alumni, with 16 in the pipeline. He has mentored numerous undergraduates and 14 postdoctoral researchers — including John Gaskins, another UVA Engineering Ph.D. alumnus, with whom he co-founded Laser Thermal. The Charlottesville-based company provides material thermal testing services and equipment developed through his research.
What is the secret to his success?
“It’s all collaborations,” Hopkins said. “Just luck and fun that I’ve ended up working with a lot of people in different avenues of material science, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, physics and chemistry, all tackling different technologies. We’ve been able to build experiments and adapt to the materials that we want to study in the systems we want to study.”
And every new partnership offers a mixture of discovery and gratification.
“We are measuring things that we would have never gotten a chance to measure,” Hopkins said, using a project testing protective coatings for jet engine parts with Rolls Royce as one example.
“Our data on their new coating is actually going into decisions they are making in the next year or two on what’s going to be in their engines. That’s super cool for me, and my students involved in this just love it.”
