From heavy metal to nuclear energy: John Bernardin
It's 2023 and Purdue faculty are clearing out their offices, as the Mechanical Engineering building closes for a two-year renovation project. Among the artifacts unearthed: a 30-year-old bulletin board from Issam Mudawar’s heat transfer lab featuring photos of all his former students.
Among all the students’ headshots, John Bernardin is hard to miss.
“Of course, what I remember most about John is the hair and the Metallica poster!” laughs Mudawar. “Amazing to think that he is now a research engineer at Los Alamos!”
The Memory Remains
John was born and raised in Appleton, Wisconsin, and benefitted from the technical inspiration of his family. “My father was a Ph.D. chemist,” says John, “and my grandfather was a self-educated tinkerer, who built his own telescopes and ham radios. So engineering and science was in my blood from a very young age. In 5th grade, I gave a book report about neutrons, protons, and electrons – kind of foreshadowing the role that nuclear energy would play in my life!”
After taking a drafting class in high school, he was hooked. He enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to study mechanical engineering, and scored a semester-long internship at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. “I helped the scientists set up their experiments,” remembers John, “and I just fell in love with engineering and research. I couldn’t soak up enough of it.”
All of the engineers at Los Alamos had advanced degrees, so John decided he needed to pursue a Master’s or Ph.D. “I visited the best engineering schools in the Midwest,” he says, “and was most impressed with Purdue, especially Issam Mudawar’s lab.”
“Some graduate students like to take their time and learn the process, but that wasn’t John,” said Mudawar, the Betty Ruth and Milton B. Hollander Family Professor of Mechanical Engineering. “He was such a great performer, right from the start. He wanted to accomplish things, and accomplish them fast.”
Mudawar was part of a hall-of-fame Heat Transfer department at Purdue, and John wanted in. “I walked down the hallways at Purdue, and it was a who’s who of mechanical engineering,” says John. “These were the guys who literally wrote the book on heat transfer! Most of my colleagues in undergrad thought of heat transfer as the dark arts; it’s a difficult topic with lots of math and modeling behind it. But I was fascinated by two-phase heat transfer and thermofluid behaviors, and was so excited to be there. Issam’s lab was world-class – and of course, it still is!”
Throughout his Master’s degree, John learned how to conduct experiments and get results. During his Ph.D., he and Prof. Mudawar worked on quenching of boiling heat transfer by spray-cooling high-temperature alloys. “He helped to bridge two completely different disciplines: heat transfer and material science; our 1999 paper on the Leidenfrost effect is still frequently cited,” says Mudawar, who himself is now the most-cited spray cooling researcher in the world. “He’s also one of the only students I’ve ever had who collaborated with me after he left! We published several papers together, even after he graduated. That was really a joy.”
Nothing Else Matters
OK, so, let’s talk about that ‘90s photo.
“Listen,” laughs John. “I was the youngest of four kids, so I probably challenged the status quo more often than anyone else in my family. Not necessarily in a bad way, but I was always pushing the limits. I had a lot of friends in Milwaukee in the ‘80s and ‘90s who were into punk and heavy metal. I just never wanted to be the kind of person who you could easily read from the outside.”
Indeed, if you look closer at the photo, you’ll see two things that betray his headbanger image. First, his earring: it’s actually “the bent,” a symbol of the international engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi. “It was kind of that hidden message – yes, I’ve got long hair and an earring, but my earring is tied directly to my interest in engineering,” he says.
The second is his T-shirt, which doesn’t feature Metallica, but Albert Einstein. “I love his philosophy,” says John. “I read his book on special relativity when I was an undergrad, and I was fascinated by it, and my shirt reflects that.”
“I’m a complex person, and that photo represents all the different sides of me,” he continues. “I can be rebellious and aggressive, but it’s usually in pursuit of science and engineering knowledge of all kinds, that is not the status quo. And that has even carried over to my work at Los Alamos. If you look at my publication list, you’ll see stuff that’s all over the board. I’ve never been satisfied studying just one thing.”
Wherever I May Roam
After graduating, John was heavily recruited by several organizations. “Purdue carries with it a very prestigious name, so I had a lot of opportunities to choose from,” he says. “I turned down several lucrative offers, because I wanted to stay in research. So I did a post-doc at Los Alamos, where I had interned as an undergrad.”
John flourished in the academic environment of Los Alamos, the U.S. Department of Energy lab which is one of the largest scientific institutions in the world. “There are more than 2,000 engineers here,” says John. “It’s one of the few places on earth where you can assemble experts in material science, chemistry, physics, electrical engineering, nuclear engineering, mathematics, biology, and more – to focus on some of the most challenging issues we’re facing today. It’s like being a kid in a candy store.”
With his experimental background from Purdue, John immediately went to work designing and building complex mechanical systems for national science facilities – from water-cooling systems to vacuum infrastructure. His hardware experience (and project management skills) caught the eye of NASA, who enlisted John’s team at Los Alamos to design and build instruments for their next Mars rover. “This was an extremely difficult process,” says John. “You can’t just buy instruments designed for a Martian environment, so everything on these rovers is novel. It had to be qualified through lengthy and complex procedures. But it also had to be delivered on time, because they had a firm launch date.
The Curiosity rover landed on Mars in August 2012, carrying ChemCam: a suite of instruments designed to vaporize rock surfaces with a laser, and analyze their chemical composition. John was the lead mechanical engineer for ChemCam, working with Roger Wiens (now a professor at Purdue). Later, John also worked on its successor, SuperCam, which accompanied the Perseverance rover to Mars in February 2021. Both instruments are still active today, continuing to deliver experimental data back to scientists on earth.
“It was absolutely exhilarating to see my work end up on another planet,” says John. “I never thought I could do anything like this. It was the single most technologically challenging thing I’ve ever been involved in.”
Today, John oversees a team of about 30 people at Los Alamos, managing multiple projects of mechanical engineering and material science research, with a $12 million annual budget. His team works on everything from national defense, to radiation detection, to nuclear energy. They’ve been called upon to offer engineering assistance during disasters like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, or the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. They collaborated with colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California on their recent breakthrough in fusion ignition.
“I spent a long time being a nuts-and-bolts engineer, but my real joy is conducting novel research,” says John. “There’s a sign on my door that says, ‘Scientists study the world as it is, engineers create the world that never has been.’ That freedom is just like my days at Purdue, when we were free to explore new research, which builds on the fundamentals of heat transfer and material science.”
More than anything, John is now a 26-year veteran who mentors young engineers, in the same way that Los Alamos engineers mentored him in his early career. “It’s great to hear that John is sharing his expertise with the next generation, in terms of both fundamental and practical skills,” says Prof. Mudawar. “His leadership is showing in the success at Los Alamos. It’s very great to hear.”
“Without that education from Purdue, I don’t know how successful I would have been,” says John. “Developing those instruments for the Mars rover was very stressful, but I had the fundamentals from Purdue, and had built those heat transfer models. I also had the experimental experience from Prof. Mudawar’s lab, so I could deliver my work with confidence.”
“And yes, I still do listen to Metallica on occasion!”
Writer: Jared Pike, jaredpike@purdue.edu, 765-496-0374