Giuseppe Romano
Research Scientist, Institute for Soldier Nanotechnology

Who they work with
Giuseppe Romano is a research scientist in MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnology; he is also affiliated with the MIT Energy Initiative. His research integrates multiscale modeling, machine learning, and high-throughput experiments to accelerate the discovery of energy materials. Recent focus includes the inverse design of devices for photovoltaic and thermoelectric applications. He is the PI/co-PI of projects funded by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and NASA. He is the developer of OpenBTE, an open-source software for simulating nanoscale thermal transport in arbitrary geometries, and coordinated the development of ∂PV, a differentiable solar cell simulator. In 2019, he was a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and in the Fall of 2018, he was a visiting scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. Romano earned a BS in telecommunications engineering and a PhD in microelectronics engineering from the Università di Roma Tor Vergata.
Selected Publications
- Romano, G., Jain, A., Dehmamy, N., Chi, C., & Zhang, X. (2025). DiffChip: Thermally Aware chip placement with automatic differentiation. In Proceedings of the 75th Electronic Components and Technology Conference (ECTC). IEEE.
- Dudde, K., Elhajhasan, M., Würsch, G., Themann, J., Lierath, J., Paul, D., Protik, N. H., Romano, G., & Callsen, G. (2025). Phonon mean free path spectroscopy by Raman thermometry. Materials Today Physics, 57, 101784.
- Elhajhasan, M., Seemann, W., Dudde, K., Vaske, D., Callsen, G., Rousseau, I., Weatherley, T. F. K., Carlin, J.-F., Butté, R., Grandjean, N., Protik, N. H., & Romano, G. (2023). Optical and thermal characterization of a group-III nitride semiconductor membrane by microphotoluminescence spectroscopy and Raman thermometry. Physical Review B, 108(23), 235313. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.108.235313
Media
- October 7, 2022: MIT News, New system designs nanomaterials that conduct heat in specific ways
- December 9, 2021: MIT News, A tool to speed development of new solar cells
- January 19, 2021: MIT News, An intro to the fast-paced world of artificial intelligence