Okamoto, Nicole
Professor and Chair, Mechanical Engineering
Preferred: nicole.okamoto@sjsu.edu
Telephone
Preferred: (408) 924-4054 but email is preferred
Office Hours
Education
- Doctor of Philosophy, Univ Of Illinois Urbana Campus, 1999
Bio
Nicole graduated from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI, in 1993 with a BS. She continued on at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she worked on both an MSME and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering under the advisement
of Dr. Tony Jacobi. Her Ph.D. thesis was entitled “Flow, Heat Transfer, and Pressure-Drop
Interactions in Louvered-Fin Arrays.” This work involved analyzing local convective
heat transfer in low-Reynolds number flow and how the heat transfer behavior is affected
by the fluid dynamics throughout the array. During her years at the University of
Illinois, she worked as a research assistant at the Air Conditioning and Refrigeration
Center, a joint National Science Foundation and Industry collaborative center.
Upon completion of her dissertation, in January 1999 Nicole began to teach at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where she taught Thermodynamics, Advanced Thermodynamics, Heat Transfer,
Introduction to Engineering, and Introduction to Engineering Fundamentals and learned
to enjoy barbeque and hot weather. In August 2001 she moved to San Jose State University where she is currently teaching classes in the thermal sciences, advising senior
design teams and masters students, doing research in modeling of thermal systems and
the cooling of electronics, and enjoying the great weather. She is married to Glenn
Okamoto, and they have two young daughters, Erin and Evelyn.
Links
Nicole Okamoto is a director of the Center for Thermal Management Research.
For information about the off-campus MSME program at Lockheed Martin or other off-site MS programs, visit the Graduate and Extended Studies website.