Carolina Mira-Hernández is a Colombian researcher that focuses on the sustainable use of thermal energy. She graduated from Mechanical Engineering, Engineering Physics and Master in Engineering at Eafit University in Medellín, Colombia. She worked in the same institution, for more than five years, as a lecturer in thermal sciences for mechanical engineering.

In 2019, she completed her PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, USA. She was a recipient of the fellowship for doctoral studies abroad from the Colombian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. For her dissertation, she used high-speed visualizations in combination with image processing techniques to explore the connection between flow morphology and the critical heat flux phenomenon during pool boiling and two-phase jet impingement.

After her PhD studies, she returned to Colombia and joined the research collaboration program Energética 2030, in which 8 universities and 4 industrial partners cooperate to develop solutions for the sustainability and reliability of the Colombian energy sector. As part of Energética 2030, she designed and tested household appliances with thermal energy storage and driven by photovoltaic electricity.

In 2022, she was awarded a MSCA-PF for the project ET4PCM, which aims to develop a non-invasive impedance sensor to evaluate in real-time the liquid fraction evolution of phase change materials, and will enable smart control of latent thermal energy storages. For ET4PCM, Carolina will be working under the supervision of Pr. Simone Mancin from the Department of Management and Engineering at University of Padua.