Thermal Engineer Dr. Columbia Mishra Brings the Heat

Meet Dr. Columbia Mishra, a senior thermal engineer at Intel Corporation and an ASME Early Career Leadership Intern. When she isn’t solving problems with heat transfer in microelectronics, or learning to pilot small airplanes, Columbia volunteers as a mentor to high school students, introducing her three young mentees to the unlimited possibilities of higher education and an engineering career.

“I am proud to be an engineer because I’ve had the best training to think logically, analytically, and approach a problem and solve it,” she says.

A native of Malda, a small town in West Bengal, India, Columbia published her first research paper at an ASME conference as an undergraduate student in Mechanical Engineering at Jadavpur University. During her Master’s studies in Mechanical Engineering at Texas Tech University, Columbia was a recipient of an ASME Foundation scholarship. Later, she received another ASME grant to participate in Engineers Without Borders, applying her engineering skills to improve quality of life for elderly residents of Juarez, Mexico. She joined ASME as a Master’s student, and then as a Ph.D. student in Mechanical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin, Columbia served as a technical committee member and volunteered with ASME conferences and journals.

As is clear in this video, Columbia is passionate about the opportunities afforded her through involvement with ASME, especially the ECLIPSE program (Early Career Leadership Intern Program to Serve Engineering), where she helps graduate engineering students transition into the workforce. “The value of volunteering with ASME is to promote engineering and science for the benefit of society as a whole,” Columbia says.