Robert Tzou is a James C. Dowell professor in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of Missouri. He previously served as chairman of the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department for 15 years, who is also the deputy editor of asme journal of heat transfer, a world reknown journal. 
An American Society of Mechanical Engineers fellow, Tzou has given a number of keynote lectures at several national and international professional society conferences with research foci in microscale heat transfer, ultrafast laser-material interactions and solid mechanics. 

He is the founding chair for the ASME International Conference on Micro/Nanoscale Heat Transfer and has received a NASA Recognition Award.

As the dimension of physical devices continuously shrinks from macro-, micro-, into nanoscale with the transient time shortened into the pico- to femtosecond domain, additional physical behaviors exist in heat transport other than the classical diffusion employing the Fourier’s law. The existing 11 models in microscale heat transfer, therefore, do not necessarily communicate well with each other, making the selection of one model over the others difficult for a given material.

During the lecture, Prof. Tzou introduced the dual-phase-lag model, which will be presented to extract the common features among these apparently very different models developed on different physical bases. 

During the Q&A Prof. Tzou answered questions raised by SUSTech students and faculty members.