Prof Josua Meyer, was in 2002, appointed at the University of Pretoria as professor, and Head of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering (1900 students), and in 2004, Chair of the School of Engineering (7000 students). He is now serving his fourth terms for both Head of Department and School Chair. He is leading the Clean Energy Research unit that he established with a broad focus on thermal sciences and fluid flow, but with a narrower focus on heat exchangers. His heat exchanger work focused on fundamental work of flow in the transitional flow regime, nanofluids, and condensation. On an applications level his work focus on thermal-solar-, wind- and nuclear energy. He has grown this group to approximately 50 full-time graduate students and 10 staff members. During this time he also established various labs with state-of-the-art instrumentation and designed and constructed (with his group members) more than 12 unique experimental set-ups. He has received 11 different national teaching awards from three different universities, as well as an international award, in 2013, for “Best professor in mechanical and aeronautical engineering”. He has won more than 45 research awards including 23 awards for best article of the year or best conference paper. For his research he has won the following national and international awards: Thomas Price Award, Rand Coal Award, South African Institute of Mechanical Engineers Medal, LT Campbell-Pitt Award, Literati Award, Chairman’s Award of the South African Institute of Air-conditioning and Refrigeration, and Will Stoecker award. He is a member or fellow of various professional institutes and societies such as ASME, ASHRAE, AIAA, and the Royal Aeronautical Society. He has a B1-rating from the NRF. His is a “highly cited researcher” according to the ISI, and ranked among the top 1% in engineering. He is on the editorial board of 13 journals and is editor of 7 journals in his field of research. Recently, he was on the selection committee of the Franklin Institute Awards Programme (one of the world’s oldest (since 1824)) for the Benjamin Franklin Medal. To date, 117 awards of this institute have been honoured with Nobel prizes.

Originally, his teaching and research interests were in computational fluid dynamics. During the period 1993 to 1994 it shifted to experimental thermal/fluid sciences with specific application to air-conditioning and refrigeration systems. To make this possible, He started specialising in fluid mechanics, thermodynamics and heat transfer - the main building blocks that have to be integrated for developing new refrigeration and air-conditioning systems. The emphasis of his research at present is on enhanced heat transfer, convection heat transfer, and condensation heat transfer.