Graduate Student (Ph.D.) – School of  Mechanical, Aerospace, & Manufacturing Engineering, College of Engineering, UConn

By Shruthi Nagaraj – Research Assistant, UConn SNE IAC

The University of Connecticut’s School of Engineering welcomed Prathamesh Patil, during Fall 2022 as a Ph.D. student into the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Prathamesh (also goes by the name ‘Prat’) is employed as a student assessor at the Department of Energy funded Southern New England Industrial Assessment Center (SNE-IAC) and with the Pratt and Whitney Institute for Advanced Systems Engineering at UConn. Prior to joining UConn, Prathamesh had begun his doctoral studies after completing his undergraduate (BSME) and graduate (MSME) programs, conferred from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of New Haven in Connecticut.

During Fall of 2022, Prat transferred to UConn as a graduate student to continue his PhD program because of his advisor’s move to UConn as a faculty. Prat has been passionate and deeply vested in energy and energy efficiency with interests in Building Energy Science, thermodynamics, HVAC/R, thermal storage, and machine learning/artificial intelligence. There is a significant bustle of energy and energy efficiency projects and research going on at UConn, which according to Prat, is conducive to further attaining experience and facilitating leads on a new and exciting career in the energy field. The new courses Thermodynamics and Computational Fluid Dynamics that Prat has taken up at UConn seem to be very enlightening for him.

Prat has worked at the Southern New England IAC since its inception, initially through the University of New Haven and later on continuing as a grad student of UConn. The IAC provides an incredible opportunity for students who want to work in the field of energy to visit and learn in the field and make recommendations that could save a significant amount of energy. Since he saw a positive impact, he was immediately attracted to it. Being a student assessor at IAC, Prat says that he has developed a sound technical knowledge on the instrumentation and equipment used in gaining valuable field experience and good experience with field work and techno economic sizing being a student assessor at IAC. Prat has earned the certificate of excellence from the Department of Energy office and has attended more than twenty onsite assessments as a part of IAC’s team and has served as the student lead and safety lead for several of them. Prat recently passed his qualifying exam to continue his Ph.D. work.

UConn SNE IAC would like to wish Prat the best as he continues his graduate studies and work at SNE IAC.