About Thermowafer

Derek Dayan is a mechanical engineer and cryogenist. His fascination with low-temperature physics led him to the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he earned his bachelor's degree while enduring the sub-arctic climate — an environment that only deepened his drive to understand the physics of cold.

That drive didn't start in a classroom. Derek has had a workshop to explore his creativity since he was a teenager, beginning with woodworking. Growing up in a family of craftsmen surrounded him with role models who instilled a strong work ethic long before he ever picked up an engineering textbook.

Somewhere along the way he taught himself glassblowing, and has always gravitated toward thermodynamics through that artistic lens — heat, flow, and transformation as a craft rather than just a set of equations. Growing that shop into industrial-grade equipment running on liquid oxygen gave him direct, hands-on exposure to the cryogenic industry, and a working understanding of the pressure vessels and low-temperature systems involved. Continuously developing his glassblowing operation became the catalyst that pulled him toward engineering in the first place.

His interest in the cryogenic industry pushed him to take initiative early — attending conferences at his own expense to stay current with the field's contemporary developments. That curiosity also pulled him backward in time: digging into historical texts to understand the evolution of low-temperature physics and its technologies, and finding himself romanticizing the field's early pioneers as if they were artists rather than scientists.

That same artistic sensibility is what led Derek to found Thermowafer, Inc., embarking on an endeavor with real-world implications, and an equally real degree of difficulty. He sees thermal management not just as an engineering discipline, but as an art — the mastery of the heat pathway. In a micro-system, every milliwatt of heat removed must be expertly channeled out without disrupting the delicate balance of the device. It's the same instinct that once shaped glass over a flame — now applied at the scale of a wafer.