H. Jeremy Cho

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Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Expertise: Atmospheric water harvesting, Energy, Heat mass transfer, Soft materials, Imaging, Data science

Biography

H. Jeremy Cho is a mechanical engineer whose main line of research focuses on converting water vapor into a drinkable form. Since moving to Nevada, he has focused on finding solutions to the Southwest water crisis through atmospheric water harvesting.

Cho has expertise in soft matter physics and phase-change heat transfer, and constantly looks for ways to convert energy more efficiently (fossil fuels, solar, geothermal, steam energies, etc.). His lab explores the use of soft materials, such as hydrogels, in creating new technologies to slow the threats of climate change. He co-founded and leads the research team behind WAVR Technologies, Inc., a UNLV startup that makes devices capable of capturing water vapor from the air around us for commercial and individual uses.

He received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation for his promising work on atmospheric water harvesting in 2022. Before joining UNLV in 2019, he was a postdoc at Princeton working with soft matter physics and did research at MIT on phase-change heat transfer.

Education

Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
S.M., Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
B.S.E., Mechanical Engineering, University of Michigan

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energy, science & technology, sustainability

H. Jeremy Cho In The News

Las Vegas startup turns desert air into water, targeting data-center demand

Could water pulled from the desert air help Southern Nevada confront its water challenges — and concerns about the growing demand from data centers? That is the goal behind a developing technology from WAVR Technologies, a Las Vegas startup commercializing atmospheric water-harvesting technology developed at UNLV.

Would you trust drinking water harvested from the air?

The University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) has been researching an innovative new approach to atmospheric water harvesting with improved water collection rates in arid environments.

Las Vegas startup turns desert air into water

Las Vegas-based WAVR Technologies can actually turn air into water. The deep tech startup that spun out of UNLV is commercializing atmospheric water harvesting systems that extract water directly from the air — even in desert environments at humidity levels as low as 10 percent.

These devices harvest drinking water from the air in the planet’s driest places. Critics say they’re an expensive distraction

The arid desert landscape of Death Valley is not the obvious place to find water. Yet it’s here, in one of the planet’s hottest and driest places, that Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineers decided to test new technology to pull drinking water from an unconventional source: the air.