Team

Allison Mahvi is a professor of Mechanical Engineering at UW-Madison and is the director of the Laboratory for Energy Transport and Storage. She also has a joint appointment with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.  She received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2018 and her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 2012. Between 2018 and 2019, Allison worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and then transitioned to a second postdoctoral position at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, where she worked between 2019 and 2022. Allison’s research focus is in two-phase flows, surface enhancements, advanced thermal energy systems, and thermal energy storage devices.

Arganthaël Berson is an Assistant Teaching Professor at UW-Madison. He received his PhD from École Centrale de Lyon (France) and subsequently worked at the Fuel Cell Research Center at Queen’s University (Kingston, Canada) and was a faculty at Durham University (UK) before joining the UW-Madison in 2015. His research interests are in developing advanced experimental techniques for characterizing heat and mass transport in evaporating and condensing flows for energy applications. He is also an enthusiastic teacher, and he received the F.M. Young Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award from the Pi Tau Sigma society in 2018. At the UW-Madison, he teaches several introductory courses on thermofluids (ME361, ME363, ME364), Energy systems laboratories (ME370), and the Solar Engineering (ME/CBE 567) course. He is interested in developing opportunities for undergraduate students to participate in research as well as other hands-on activities around solar energy.