Asegun Henry

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Asegun Sekou Famake Henry is the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. He studies energy storage, heat transfer, and phonons—the vibrations that carry heat in materials.

Henry was born in Tallahassee, Florida, to Anthony Henry and Oare Dozier-Henry, both former Florida A&M University professors. His family exposed him to West African and African-American culture, and he began playing the djembe at age ten. He attended Florida A&M University for his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering.

Under MIT professor Gang Chen, he earned his master’s and PhD in mechanical engineering in 2009. He then did postdoctoral research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, studying how heat moves through materials, and later at Northwestern University, researching the thermodynamic properties of oxides. He received fellowships from the Lemelson Foundation, the Department of Energy, UNCF, and Ford Foundation, and in 2011 was a fellow of ARPA-E before joining Georgia Tech in 2012 as an assistant professor.

In 2016 he won the NSF CAREER Award to study heat conduction via phonons. He has explored ideas like using sound to teach about how atoms vibrate and how different vibrations interact.

In 2017 his Georgia Tech team set a world record by running a ceramic pump at 1,200°C for 72 hours, pumping molten tin. The achievement was recognized by Guinness World Records.

Henry also researches cheaper ways to store renewable energy. In 2018 his team proposed TEGS-MPV—Thermal Energy Grid Storage Using Multi-Junction Photovoltaics—a system that stores energy as heat in molten silicon, ready to be released when needed. The project has been described in media as “Sun in a box” and aims to lower the cost of grid energy storage.