"Srinath Ekkad, associate professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech, will be leading a U.S. delegation of over 30 researchers to India for the 8th Indian Society for Heat and Mass Transfer/American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ISHMT/ASME) Joint Heat and Mass Transfer Conference to be held in Hyderabad, India from January 3-5, 2008. This biennial conference has fostered U.S.-Indian research collaborations through various workshops in different aspect of thermal science research. This year, there will be workshops on gas turbine heat transfer, combustion, heat exchangers, electronic cooling, fuel cells, and nuclear heat transfer. The workshops are held in different cities before and after the conference. One plenary speaker and six keynote speakers from the U.S. will lecture on various topics. There will be 39 U.S. based papers in the conference, the most ever from the U.S. compared to any of the previous conferences. Ekkad also has secured funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the delegation. He is funding 20 researchers through the NSF funding to go to India to participate in the conference and workshops. Along with Ekkad, Danesh Tafti, an associate professor of ME, is also participating in the conference. Two ME graduate students, Santosh Abraham and Pritish Parida, will be presenting papers at the conference."