Prabhakar R. Bandaru is a professor at the University of California, San Diego. He was a former Director of the Materials Science Program for two terms, at U.C. San Diego (2015-2021). He is also affiliated to the Electrical Engineering and the Nanoengineering departments at UCSD. His research group is mainly interested in topics related to electrochemical energy storage, control of thermal energy, and fluid flow at the nanoscale. The basis of the underlying investigations is materials physics and chemistry, invoking the electrical, optical, and thermal properties of materials at the mesoscopic and microscopic levels.