Ali Shakouri is professor of electrical engineering at University of California Santa Cruz. He received his Ph.D. from California Institute of Technology in 1995. His current research is on nanoscale heat and current transport in semiconductor devices, submicron thermal imaging, micro refrigerators on a chip and novel optoelectronic integrated circuits. He is the director of the Thermionic Energy Conversion center, a multi university research initiative aiming to improve direct thermal to electric energy conversion technologies. He received the Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering in 1999, the NSF CAREER award in 2000 and the UCSC School of Engineering FIRST Professor Award in 2004.