Professor Bhattacharjee earned a B.Tech. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur in 1983 and his Ph.D. from Washington State University, Pullman, USA in 1988. After two years of post-doctoral work on a NASA project, he joined San Diego State University in 1991 as an Assistant Professor, and was promoted as a Professor in 2000. He is currently serving as the Graduate Advisor for the department. Recipient of Faculty Friend Award, Outstanding Faculty Award, and Distinguished Faculty Award, Prof. Bhattacharjee offers thermal science related classes at the graduate and undergraduate levels.
Prof. Bhattacharjee has been actively involved in research on microgravity combustion and radiation heat transfer. Several of his experiments on flame spread over solid fuels have been conducted aboard NASA's Sounding Rockets, Space Shuttles and Russia's Mir Space Station. Other research interests include fire detection, infra-red pyrometry and knowledge-based distributed intelligence. For the past several years Prof. Bhattacharjee and his collaborators from Gifu University, Japan, have been studying flame dynamics in the space environment with a grant from NASA and Govt. of Japan. His passion for making thermodynamics easier to learn led to the continuing development of TEST, The Expert System for Thermodynamics (www.thermofluids.net), regularly accessed by a huge number of students, professionals and educators from around the world. He has published one book introducing his software TEST (publisher: Prentice Hall) and is currently working on a thermodynamic textbook.
Professor Bhattacharjee is married and has three children, Robi, Sarah and Neil.