Asegun Henry

Founder & CTO at Fourth Power

Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

About Asegun Henry

Asegun Henry is Founder & CTO at Fourth Power. Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States.

I'm an expert in heat transfer, with a special emphasis on understanding the science of energy transport, storage and conversion at the atomic level. My passion is the development of new industrial scale energy technologies to mitigate climate change, and I founded a company (Fourth power) that is commercializing a new technology that we developed in my laboratories at Georgia Tech and MIT over the last ~10 years. My research has led to significant advances and contributions to several fields within energy and heat transfer, namely: solar fuels and thermochemistry, phonon transport in disordered materials, phonon transport at interfaces, and my team developed the highest temperature pump on record, which used an all ceramic mechanical pump to pump liquid metal above 1400°C. This technological breakthrough is now in the Guinness Book of World Records (https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/441807-highest-operating-temperature-pump) and has opened the door for new high temperature energy systems concepts, such as methane cracking for CO2 free hydrogen production and a new grid level energy storage approach termed thermal batteries, also affectionately known as “Sun in a Box”. I have been the recipient of a number of awards including: The National Science Foundation Career Award The Lockheed Inspirational Young Faculty Award The Georgia Power Professor of Excellence Award The ASME Bergles-Rohsenow Young Investigator Award in Heat Transfer (https://www.asme.org/about-asme/honors-awards/achievement-awards/bergles-rohsenow-young-investigator-award-in-heat) The 2018 World Technology Award for Energy The 2021 Nokia Bell Labs Prize (https://www.bell-labs.com/institute/blog/capturing-the-sun-in-a-box-thermal-battery-inventor-wins-the-2021-bell-labs-prize/) The 2022 Inaugural Lewis Latimer Fellowship (https://www.latimerfellows.com/) and others. The 2023 NSF Waterman Award (https://new.nsf.gov/news/nsf-honors-3-early-career-researchers-alan-t) I was extremely fortunate to be able to have my entire post secondary education externally supported with a FAMU Distinguished scholars award, an MIT Lemelson Presidential Fellowship, a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, a UNCF-Merck Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Ford Foundation postdoctoral Fellowship and an ARPA-E Fellowship. www.gofourth.com https://ase.mit.edu

Skills

  • Renewable Energy
  • Solar Energy
  • Energy

Additional experience

  • Full Professor

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology

    Started February 2023

Education

  • Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  • BS, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University