John H. Lienhard is the author and voice of the popular radio program, The Engines of Our Ingenuity. The show airs daily in the United States on Public Radio and internationally on Armed Forces Radio. For his work on Engines, he received the 1989 ASME Ralph Coates Medal for contributions to the public understanding of technology. He also received the 1991 Portrait Division Award from the American Women in Radio and Television, and the 1998 American Society of Mechanical Engineers Engineer-Historian Award. He was also named as one of the five finalists from among 1,300 entrants in the 1993 New York Festival International Radio Competition.

Lienhard is Professor Emeritus at the University of Houston. From 1989 to 2000, he served as M.D. Anderson Professor of Technology and Culture in the departments of Mechanical Engineering and History at the University of Houston, and from 1980 to 1989 he was Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the school. His research areas include heat transfer with phase change, hydrodynamic boiling theory, condensation, flashing, thermodynamics of phase change, dynamics of jets and sheets, and the history of technology. He is also an Honorary Member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

He was born in St. Paul Minnesota on August 17, 1930, and received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 1951 from Oregon State College, an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1953, and a PhD. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in 1961.

Lienhard has written hundreds of professional journal articles, along with several technical books. He maintains full scripts of Engines programs on the web at http://www.uh.edu/engines. The site presently serves some 30,000 visitors each week. Each year KUHF also produces an hour-long Engines-related compact disk of twenty or so Engines programs. Professor Lienhard is also a prolific speaker and has given approximately 1100 major addresses.

All information from this biographical sketch was taken from the Engines of Our Ingenuity web site or from information provided by Professor Lienhard.