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2026 M. Necati Ozisik Distinguished Lecture: Dr. Helcio Orlande
About the M. Necati Ozisik Distinguished Lecture series:
The Dr. M. Necati Ozisik Distinguished Lecture Series was established in late 2022 to honor the tremendous impact and contributions that Dr. Ozisik had on research, teaching and the profession of engineering. Dr. Ozisik joined the NC State University Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering faculty in 1963. He was the primary advisor for more than 45 doctoral students at NC State, many of whom are now established leaders in industry and academia. Dr. Ozisik was an internationally known authority on the subject of Heat Transfer who had over 270 research publications and authored 11 books.
He was an elected Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the recipient of numerous prestigious awards recognizing his teaching and research excellence, including the Oliver Max Gardner Award (1985), the ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award (1987), the North Carolina State University Alumni Distinguished Graduate Professors Award (1989), and the Alexander Quarles Holladay Medal for Excellence (1992). Dr. Ozisik was a kind and thoughtful man who dedicated his life to making advances in his profession and developing the next generation of engineering leaders. He continued to remain active with research and writing books for several years after his official retirement as Professor Emeritus in 1993.
TITLE: Inverse Problems in Bioheat Transfer
ABSTRACT: The research work of Prof. M. Necati Ozisik on inverse problems dates to the seventies, with the publication of one of the first papers on the subject, involving an analytical study related to the Radiative Transfer Equation (Siewert C.E.; Ozisik M.N.; Yener Y., Inverse problem for multigroup neutron transport theory, Nuclear Science and Engineering, vol. 63, pp. 95-96, 1977). In 1991, Prof. Ozisik co-authored a paper that is still today a major reference to inverse heat transfer problems, with more than 430 citations in the Scopus database as of March 2026 (Jarny Y.; Ozisik M.N.; Bardon J.P., A general optimization method using adjoint equation for solving multidimensional inverse heat conduction, Int. J. Heat Mass Transfer, Vol. 34, pp. 2911-2919, 1991). I had the privilege of being one of Prof. Ozisik’s Ph.D. students during the nineties, when he was most active on the solution of inverse problems in conduction, convection and radiation. As a tribute to Prof. Ozisik, and in gratitude to his influence on my whole career, this presentation is devoted to the solution of inverse problems.
Applications of inverse problems in bioheat transfer are vast, including the detection and the thermal treatments of cancer. Furthermore, modern techniques for nonintrusive temperature measurements of organs and tissues in the human body, such as photoacoustic and magnetic resonance, can be significantly improved through the solution of inverse problems. This presentation summarizes our developments on the solution of inverse bioheat transfer problems, by using techniques within the Bayesian framework of statistics. Special focus is given on recent results related to temperature measurements taken by magnetic resonance during thermoablation procedures. Our objective was to mitigate the effects of artifacts appearing in classical thermometry images. Temperature measurements provided by the classical magnetic resonance thermometry in regions not affected by artifacts were used for the solution of inverse problems, thus allowing for the indirect observation of temperatures in the whole region of interest and estimation of their associated uncertainties. This approach has great potential for future clinical applications, in order to monitor and control the highest temperatures during radiofrequency thermoablation procedures, which cannot be directly observed through the classical magnetic resonance thermometry.
Bio: Helcio R. B. Orlande was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1965. He obtained his Mechanical Engineering degree at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in 1987 and his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering at the same University in 1989. After obtaining his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering in 1993 at North Carolina State University, he joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering of UFRJ, where he was the department head during 2006 and 2007. His research areas of interest include the solution of inverse heat and mass transfer problems, as well as the use of numerical, analytical and hybrid numerical-analytical methods of solution of direct heat and mass transfer problems. He is the co-author of 5 books, 2 patents and more than 400 papers in major journals and conferences. He is a member of the Scientific Council and of the Executive Committee of the International Centre for Heat and Mass Transfer, and the Vice-President of the Assembly for International Heat Transfer Conferences. He serves on the Editorial Boards of the journals Heat Transfer Engineering, High Temperatures – High Pressures, Archives of Thermodynamics and International Journal of Thermal Sciences. He is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Computational Thermal Sciences.