PhD Spotlight: Daniel Braconnier, PhD’23, Mechanical Engineering
Daniel Braconnier, PhD’23, mechanical engineering, led a project developing long-lasting superhydrophobic coatings, resulting in a paper published by the Royal Society of Chemistry. He also developed patent-pending thermally conductive polymer composites.
Daniel Braconnier began his PhD journey in 2019, when he received a Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Chair’s Fellowship and joined the Directed Assembly of Particles and Suspensions Laboratory, advised by Randall Erb, associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering. He previously earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s degree in materials science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
As a doctoral student, Braconnier led a project developing long-lasting superhydrophobic coatings, resulting in a paper published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, and additionally presented at the Materials Research Society (MRS) conferences and the American Chemical Society Colloids Symposium. The paper earned a Best Presentation Award at an MRS conference in 2023.
Braconnier’s dissertation was on the creation of thermally conductive polymer composites (TCPCs)—a budding material class that combines the processability and electrical resistivity of polymers with the property of high thermal conductivity. He received the College of Engineering’s PhD Conference Best Poster Award in 2023.
He developed a patent-pending TCPC that far exceeded current standards for such a material and received the inaugural Student Innovator of the Year Award in 2024 from the Northeastern University chapter of the National Academy of Inventors. Braconnier’s invention will allow future electronic devices to be slimmer, lighter, and more efficient. Braconnier has submitted elements of this work for publication to the Additive Manufacturing Journal and continues to work towards more publications on this new material.
Throughout his PhD, Braconnier made it a priority to grow as an educator. He mentored nine undergraduate researchers, advised a master’s research project, led a seminar for the Building Bridges program for high school students, and voluntarily took on teaching assistant positions. In 2020, Braconnier received the Academic Technology Scholars Award for aiding faculty in the transition from in-person to online courses during the COVID pandemic. In 2021, he was awarded the MIE Teaching Fellowship as the sole instructor for the PhD course, Soft Matter.
He currently holds a postdoctoral associate position as a Digital Learning Laboratory Fellow at the MIT.