Kenneth Diller, PhD

Chairman - Department of Biomedical Engineering at UT Austin

Kenneth R. Diller is a Professor of Biomedical and Mechanical Engineering and the Joe J. King Professor in Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.  He is the Chairman of the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Director of the Center for Biological and Medical Engineering, and is a former Chairman of the Department of Mechanical Engineering.  He is an international authority on the application of the principles of heat and mass transfer and thermodynamics to the solution of many different types of biomedical problems and on the use of light microscopy to investigate the dynamics of biological processes at high and low temperatures.  The primary areas of focus in his research include the frozen banking of human tissues for transplantation, analysis of the microvascular basis of burn injury and how it may be exploited for the optimization of therapy, development of thermodynamic models of dynamic processes at the microscopic and macroscopic scales in biological systems, and computer vision techniques for quantitative measurement and interpretation of microscopic images.  He has published more than 220 refereed articles and book chapters and edited six books on these topics.  Further, he has played a key leadership role in the adoption of total quality principles in the academic administrative processes, engineering curriculum and instructional methods at U.T.

Professor Diller earned a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering degree cum laude from Ohio State University in 1966, followed by a Master of Science in the same field in 1967.  In 1992 he was named an OSU Outstanding ME Graduate.  He was awarded the Doctor of Science degree, also in mechanical engineering, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972.  After spending an additional year at MIT as an NIH postdoctoral fellow, he joined the faculty of the College of Engineering at the University of Texas as an Assistant Professor and has progressively been promoted to his present position.  He was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship from the Federal Republic of Germany in 1983-84 to conduct research on the frozen preservation of pancreas islets at the Fraunhofer Institute at the University of Stuttgart, and a Fogarty Senior International Fellowship from the U.S. National Institutes of Health in 1989-90 for similar studies at the MRC Medical Cryobiology Laboratory in the Department of Surgery at Cambridge University in England.  He has served on the editorial boards Cryobiology, Intl. J. Transport Phenom. and Cryo-Letters and is currently Editor of the ASME J. Biomechanical Engineering and Associate Editor of Ann. Rev. Biomedical Engineering.  He is a Fellow of ASME, AAAS, and AIMBE, has been President of The Society for Cryobiology, Vice-President of the International Institute of Refrigeration and Chair of the Bioengineering Division of the ASME.  He is also recipient of the ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award for career accomplishments in biomedical heat transfer, the ASME HR Lissner Award for career accomplishment in biomedical engineering, and is an ASME Distinguished Lecturer.