Massimo "Max" Capobianchi

Dr. Capobianchi joined the faculty in 1996 after receiving his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook, specializing in the thermal sciences. His total experience includes ten years in professional practice in industry and nearly thirty years as faculty in academia. He has published research works in the area of non-Newtonian fluid mechanics and heat transfer, measurement of transport properties, and thermal modeling and management of electronics.

Most of his tenure in industry was working as a mechanical design engineer in the military electronics field. During that time, he earned a New York State Professional Engineering license (August 1988), and completed a Master of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from SUNY Stony Brook (May 1991). He returned the following September as a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. His thesis work, which was sponsored by the Department of Advanced Technology at Brookhaven National Laboratory, developed a technique to measure the Fickian diffusion coefficient in binary liquid solutions. Concurrently, in the final two years of his schooling, he worked as a visiting instructor in the Department of Automotive Engineering Technology at the SUNY College of Technology at Farmingdale. A Ph.D. degree was awarded in May 1996, after which he accepted a faculty appointment in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Gonzaga University. Over the years he served multiple terms as department chair and he is currently serving as the associate dean of the SEAS. His research interests include measurement of transport properties, and thermal modeling and management of electronics. The latter focused on the numerical simulation of the electrical behavior of integrated circuit devices in the presence of thermal interactions, and was sponsored by the National Science Foundation Center for the Design of Analog/Digital Integrated Circuits. His most current works over the last ten years have been in the area of non‐Newtonian fluid mechanics and heat transfer, where he numerically solved fundamental problems with purely viscous, shear thinning (i.e., pseudoplastic) and shear thickening (i.e., dilatant) fluids. He has published multiple papers in this area that include hydrodynamic and heat transfer solutions to internal forced convection and to external natural convection problems.