Professor Adam Wierman at Caltech in Pasadena on Thursday, July 16, 2026. (Photo by Hans Gutknecht, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)Long before data centers became fodder for national discourse and the future of artificial intelligence, Adam Wierman was studying them. Wierman, a computing and mathematical sciences professor at Caltech in Pasadena, began his research in the early 2010s when the need was for cloud computing. The data centers at that time were smaller, yet he helped them use electrical energy more efficiently, as well as less water for cooling down banks of computers. More recently, he began tackling the issues swirling…