Rate My Professor James Van de Ven

James Van de Ven is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in 2001 and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2006. Prior to his current position, he served as an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he received the Mechanical Engineering Teacher of the Year award as the Russel M. Searle Professor in May 2011. Van de Ven's expertise spans machine design, kinematics, dynamics, and model-driven design of fluid power systems. His research interests include efficient energy conversion, energy storage, and renewable energy systems. He investigates hydraulic and pneumatic energy storage to ease the integration of wind and other renewables into the power grid and to enable hydraulic hybrid vehicles. His work on hydraulic energy conversion supports switch-mode systems that rapidly alternate between efficient on and off states, impacting fluid power transmission, which accounts for 3% of U.S. energy use.