1 Phantom-g, CICECO - Aveiro Institute of Materials, Department of Physics, University of Aveiro, 3810-193, Aveiro, Portugal. lcarlos@ua.pt.
2 Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Centre for NanoScience Research, Concordia University, 7141 Sherbrooke St. West, Montreal, Quebec H4B 1R6, Canada. John.Capobianco@concordia.ca.
3 Departamento de Química Fundamental, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Cidade Universitária, 50740-560, Recife, PE, Brazil. ricardo.longo@ufpe.br.

Heat transfer and thermal properties at the nanoscale can be challenging to obtain experimentally. These are potentially relevant for understanding thermoregulation in cells. Experimental data from the transient heating regime in conjunction with a model based on the energy conservation enable the determination of the specific heat capacities for all components of a nanoconstruct, namely an upconverting nanoparticle and its conformal lipid bilayer coating. This approach benefits from a very simple, cost-effective and non-invasive optical setup to measure the thermal parameters at the nanoscale. The time-dependent model developed herein lays the foundation to describe the dynamics of heat transfer at the nanoscale and were used to understand the heat dissipation by lipid bilayers.