IES is excited to host all our energy seminar speakers, each presenting from 3:30 to 4:30 at 1003 EECS, unless otherwise noted. Take a look below to review our Winter 2025 speakers. Biographies and Abstracts will be updated as we approach the winter semester and get closer to each scheduled seminar date. If you are interested in meeting with a speaker during the day of their visit, please contact their host to schedule a meeting time.
If you’ve missed a seminar but are curious about the speaker’s presentation, please visit our new Energy Seminar Synopses page, in which an IES Graduate and Postdoctoral fellow synthesizes the presented work following each seminar.
January 16, 2025
Po-Chun Hsu, University of Chicago: Electrochemically Active Metasurfaces and Radiative Thermoregulating Materials for
Human-Building-Energy Nexus
Hosted by Yiyang Li
Biography
Po-Chun Hsu is an Assistant Professor at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, focusing on light- and heat-managing materials for energy, sustainability, and health. He earned his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering and was a postdoctoral researcher in Mechanical Engineering, both at Stanford University. Before joining the University of Chicago, he was an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke University from 2019 to 2022. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, shortlist for the Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year 2023, EcoMat Young Researcher Award, Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Awards, MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 (China), Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researchers, and Sony Faculty Innovation Award. His project in cooling textiles was selected as Top Ten World-Changing Ideas by Scientific American.
Abstract
Global warming is essentially an optothermal problem which the balance between solar heat gain and radiative heat loss is changed by the greenhouse gas emission. Immense opportunities for energy and sustainability lie in understanding and manipulating materials’ optical properties, which can originate from multiple length scales, from free charge carriers and the bound vibrational mode to nanocavity resonances. Meanwhile, electrochemistry is a powerful tuning knob for inducing drastic optical property change, varying the carrier density or even trigger a phase transformation in an electrically addressable manner, which is particularly desirable in many energy and sustainability applications where tunable range, scalability, and non-volatility are crucial. Integrating with metasurface concepts will provide additional degrees of freedom to boost performance and achieve multifunctional control. In this talk, I will present our research group’s recent progress in three aspects: (i) Wearable photon-engineered textile for multispectral and multifunctional radiative heating and cooling. (ii) High-metallicity electrochromic polyaniline for near-perfect dynamic thermal meta-emitter. (iii) Reversible metal electrodeposition for solar and mid-infrared control for all-year-round renewable thermoregulation for net-zero-energy buildings.
February 6, 2025
Richard Laine, University of Michigan: Agricultural Waste Derived Anodes for Lithium and Sodium Ion Batteries
Internal Speaker
Biography
Major research areas for the Laine group include the upcycling of agricultural waste (rice hull ash in particular) especially to silica derived chemicals (e.g. alkoxysilanes) and materials for both structural applications and silicon based lithium ion conducting polymers, synthesis of silica depleted rice hull ash based silicon carbide, oxynitride and nitride anodes for lithium ion batteries. Complementary work emphasizes the direct synthesis of polyfunctional cubic silsesquioxanes [RSiO 1.5 ] 8 , double decker silsesquioxanes [RSiO 1.5 ] 8 (O 2 SiMevinyl) 2 most recently the synthesis of polysiloxane copolymers that exhibit unexpected conjugation via disiloxane bonds. Much of this work involves the photophysical characterization of these polymeric materials.
A second area of interest includes the use of precursors for the flame spray pyrolysis processing of single and mixed metal oxide nanopowders. To date we have synthesized dozens of materials and processed them in many cases to dense, flexible thin films including solid electrolytes for lithium batteries with lithium-ion conductivities that are some of the best reported in the literature.
Abstract
Hard or turbostratic carbon anodes are most often derived from thermolysis of biomass in oxygen free environments and considerable data has been accrued to suggest that low specific surface area HC offers the most stable materials for lithiation and sodiation. As part of our efforts to valorize rice hull ash (RHA, 90 wt % SiO 2 /8 wt % C), produced in 150k ton/yr in the U.S. alone; we learned to first distillatively remove excess SiO 2 to produce silica depleted RHA or SDRHA 40-70 (40-70 wt.% SiO 2 ). 1 The resulting materials are nanocomposites of carbon and SiO 2 intermixed at nm length scales. 2 The SDRHA carbon can be used as a reductant, and because of the very small diffusion distances, SDRHA xx can be carbothermally reduced to electronics grade silicon (Si PV , 5’9’s purity) 3 or SiC (Ar) or Si 2 N 2 O (90N 2 /10H 2 ) or Si 3 N 4 (N 2 ) at much lower temperatures (1250°- 1500 °C) 4 than those used to produce the same materials commercially and at higher purities. At certain ratios, HC is a coproduct also intimately mixed with the major silicon containing material.
We have previously found that SiC/HC mixtures can serve as anode materials (coin cells) offering capacities of ≈ 950 mAh/g after long term cycling. This usually is with HC contents of just 10-15 wt. %. In this talk we discuss our discovery that SDRHA carbon can be used as a novel anode material offer lithium ion battery anodes with capacities up to 740 mAh/g twice that of graphite with exceptional savings in energy, equipment and CO 2 .
February 13, 2025
Yu Ding, Georgia Tech: Data Science and Wind Energy
Hosted by Eunshin Byon
Biography
Dr. Yu Ding is the Anderson-Interface Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he was the Mike and Sugar Barnes Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Texas A&M University. Dr. Ding’s research is in the area of data & quality science and system informatics. He is the author of the CRC Press book, Data Science for Wind Energy and a co-author of the Springer Nature book, Data Science for Nano Image Analysis. His research work is recognized by the 2019 IISE’s Technical Innovation Award, 2022 INFORMS’ Impact Prize, 2024 IISE Energy Systems Division’s Career Achievement Award, 2024 ASME’s Blackall Machine Tool and Gage Award, and 2024 SME’s S. M. Wu Research Implementation Award. Dr. Ding is a Fellow of IISE and ASME, a former Editor-in-Chief for IISE Transactions, and the current Editor-in-Chief of INFORMS Journal on Data Science.
Abstract
Wind energy is one of the fastest-growing clean energy sources. Despite the significant growth in the past two decades, wind energy missed some intermediate goals set forth earlier. One critical element needed for accelerating wind energy growth is to significantly reduce its operational cost and further boost its market competitiveness. In his book, Data Science for Wind Energy, the speaker demonstrated how statistical and machine learning methods can help address research needs in wind energy applications. The speaker will discuss some of the challenges encountered in wind applications and present use cases in which statistical and machine learning models and solutions make sensible impacts.
February 20, 2025
Ben Hobbs, Johns Hopkins: Green Power Procurement for Real Emissions Reductions: Accounting and Modelling in Complex Policy and Market Settings
Hosted by Vladimir Dvorkin
Biography
Ben Hobbs earned his PhD from Cornell University. He has been at JHU since 1995 in what is now the Department of Environmental Health & Engineering, and was previously on the faculty at Case Western Reserve University and the research staff at Brookhaven and Oak Ridge National Labs (US). The work reported here was conducted while on sabbatical at the Florence School of Regulation; he has had previous sabbaticals at University of Washington, CalTech, Comillas Pontifical University, the Netherlands Energy Research Center, and Cambridge University. He is a Life Fellow of IEEE and Fellow of INFORMS, and received a Presidential Young Investigator Award from President Reagan. He is a member of the State of Maryland’s (Climate) Mitigation Work Group and vice-chair of that state’s Air Quality Control Advisory Council. He chairs the California power market’s surveillance committee.
Dr. Hobbs leads EPICS, a NSF Global Climate center focusing on managing renewable-dominated power systems. This center is a collaboration with Imperial College, University of Melbourne, CSIRO, Georgia Tech, Resources for the Future, and UC Davis. Dr. Hobbs also participates in the Baltimore Socio-Environmental Collaborative, where his group’s CityHEAT model is a key tool for organizing and communicating information on heat wave strategies.
Abstract
Multiple market failures along with policies at federal and state levels make it difficult to predict the net systems and emissions cost impact, in both the short- and long-run, of corporate and government green power procurement strategies. I define a suite of research questions that need to be addressed to understand whether such strategies are efficient means to reduce emissions, ineffectual, or even counter productive. Market models are proposed, based on equilibrium and Stackelberg formulations based on optimization and complementarity methods, to address those questions.
February 27, 2025
Huimin Zhao, UIUC: Synthetic Biology 2.0: the Dawn of a New Era
Hosted by Fei Wen
Biography
Dr. Huimin Zhao is the Steven L. Miller Chair of chemical and biomolecular engineering and professor of chemistry, biochemistry, and bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), director of NSF AI Institute for Molecule Synthesis (moleculemaker.org), NSF iBioFoundry, and NSF Global Center for Reliable and Scalable Biofoundries, and Editor in Chief of ACS Synthetic Biology. He received his B.S. degree in Biology from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1992 and his Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1998 under the guidance of Nobel Laureate Dr. Frances Arnold. Prior to joining UIUC in 2000, he was a project leader at the Industrial Biotechnology Laboratory of the Dow Chemical Company. He was promoted to full professor in 2008. Dr. Zhao has authored and co-authored over 450 research articles and over 30 issued and pending patent applications. In addition, he has given over 510 plenary, keynote, or invited lectures. Thirty-eight (38) of his former graduate students and postdocs became professors or principal investigators around the world. Dr. Zhao received numerous research and teaching awards and honors such as AIChE Daniel I.C. Wang Award, AIChE FP&B Division Award, ECI Enzyme Engineering Award, ACS Marvin Johnson Award, SIMB Charles Thom Award, and NSF CAREER Award. His primary research interests are in the development and applications of synthetic biology, machine learning, and laboratory automation tools to address society’s most daunting challenges in health, energy, and sustainability.
Abstract
Synthetic biology aims to design novel or improved biological systems using engineering principles, which has broad applications in medical, chemical, energy, food, and agricultural industries. Thanks to rapid advances in DNA sequencing and synthesis, genome editing, artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), and laboratory automation, synthetic biology has entered a new phase of exponential growth. In this talk, I will highlight our recent work on the development of AI/ML tools for synthetic biology and an AI-powered self-driving biofoundry for enzyme, pathway, and metabolic engineering. Particularly, I will discuss how these tools can be used collectively to rapidly engineer microorganisms for production of fuels and chemicals from renewable feedstocks, which represents a more energy-efficient and sustainable alternative to the traditional petroleum-based chemical and energy manufacturing processes.
March 13, 2025
Katherine Chou, NREL: Bio-Hydrogen from Organic Wastes – Promises, Challenges, and Innovations
Hosted by Joshua Jack
Biography
Katherine Chou is a Group Research Manager and Senior Scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) based in Golden, Colorado. She currently serves as the Director of the national lab-led BioH2 Consortium supported by the U.S. Department of Energy H2 and Fuel Cell Technologies Office to develop microbial, dark fermentation technologies for economic, clean H2 production using lignocellulosic biomass as the feedstock. Her research focuses on genetic engineering of microbial systems and synthetic biology. Katherine received her Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in 2010 from UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles) where she also received B.S. and M.S. degrees in Chemical Engineering. At NREL, she received twice the President’s Award in 2017 and 2019, twice the Outstanding Mentor Award in 2015, 2017, the Science & Technology Publication award in 2017.
Abstract
The global hydrogen (H2) demand has reached more than 95 million metric tons (MMt) in 2023 and is projected to reach more than 150 MMt by 2030. However, most of the hydrogen produced to date is fossil-fuel based, releasing ~10 kg of carbon dioxide for every kilogram of hydrogen produced and raising concerns about its environmental impact. As there is growing interest in clean hydrogen, the U.S. Department of Energy initiated the “Hydrogen Energy Shot” that sets the ambitious goal of reducing the cost of clean hydrogen production to $1 per kilogram in a decade (“1-1-1”). While technologies that split water molecules to make hydrogen using electricity is presumed the first low-carbon H2 technology to market, biohydrogen produced from biomass wastes provides a decarbonizing potential beyond water-electrolysis. Biohydrogen also serves as a niche technology that cleans up and monetizes waste for renewable hydrogen generation. For this seminar, I will present my research group’s recent progress on developing microbial technologies that convert waste biomass (i.e., lignocellulose) into hydrogen and the projected social and environmental benefitsassociated with biohydrogen.
March 20, 2025 – Two-Part co-organized Seminar – IES & EWRE
On March 20th, IES and EWRE are partnering to host Bruce Logan for a two part seminar, with the first part hosted by IES from 3:30 to 4:15 pm in 1003 EECS and the second part hosted by EWRE from 4:30 to 5:30 pm in 2505 GGB. We encourage attendants to join for either or both parts of the seminar.
Bruce Logan, Penn State: Part 1) Innovations in Green Hydrogen using Novel Water Electrolyzers and Microbial Electrolysis Cells; Part 2) How to Effectively Communicate Energy Use and Carbon Emissions to Experts and the Public
Hosted by Lutgarde Raskin
IES Seminar: Add to Calendar
EWRE Seminar: Add to Calendar
Biography
Professor Bruce Logan the Director of the Institute of Energy and the Environment (IEE) and an Evan Pugh University Professor in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Penn State. His research is focused on renewable energy production, energy sustainability of the water infrastructure, hydrogen gas production using water electrolysis, and climate and energy education. He is the author or co-author of several books and over 550 refereed publications (>122,000 citations, h-index=172). He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), and a fellow of AAAS, AEESP, and several other organizations.
Abstracts
IES Abstract: Hydrogen gas is needed for our energy infrastructure but H2 should be made with limited CO2 emissions. Two methods of green (no fossil fuels) H2 production discussed here are: water electrolyzers (WE) using impaired (salty) water; and microbial electrolysis cells (MECs) fueled by organic matter. A WE developed in my lab uses thin-film composite (TFC) membranes (mass manufactured for seawater desalination) and separately contained salty solutions. These systems can achieve performance equivalent to those using expensive ion exchange membranes. We have recently developed new MEC architectures that enable improved H2 generation rates using electricity-generating bacteria. I will also discuss an alternative to production of H2 is a bioelectrochemical system that produces renewable methane from water splitting coupled with methanogens on biocathodes. These different electrochemical-based processes could enable more economical directions in green H2 or CH4 production to help decarbonize our energy infrastructure.
EWRE Abstract: Addressing climate change may be the greatest environmental challenge of the century but many of us have only a limited understanding of how our own energy use translates into CO 2 emissions. Part of the challenge is that energy is expressed in so many different units such as Calories, gallons of gasoline, gigajoules, and billions of kilowatt hours. Addressing energy use and carbon emissions requires that we have more understandable ways to describe energy use and how to couple it to carbon emissions. In this talk I introduce a new approach based on normalizing energy use to the food we eat as 1 D, and CO2 emissions from that food (1 C). With this basis for energy consumption and carbon emissions we will become better prepared for understanding where energy use reductions will be the most impactful in addressing CO 2 emissions.
March 27, 2025
Congcong Wang, MISO: Manage energy transition with market enhancements and technology innovations
Hosted by Ruiwei Jiang
Biography
Congcong Wang is Director, Markets and Grid Research at MISO. She received her PhD, MS in Electrical Engineering and MA in Economics from the University of Connecticut, and her Bachelor in Electrical Engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong University. She spent over ten years in research and Market Design focusing on price formation, market product development and advanced resource modeling, and served as a lead subject matter expert on key MISO market developments in these areas including conceptual design, stakeholder discussions, Tariff filing and implementation. Over the past five years, Congcong joined Operations and built MISO’s Operations Risk Assessment team. This team serves the Uncertainty Management function and played a critical role supporting control room managing through multiple extreme weather events and integrating fast solar growth. She recently joined Markets and Grid Research overseeing the R&D and Strategic Venture functions.
Abstract
Rapid energy transition is driving an increasingly volatile risk profile for Market and Grid Operations. System variations and uncertainties largely increase in their magnitude and arise from multiple dimensions, as traditional “dispatchable” resources are being replaced with weather-dependent intermittent renewables and neighboring grid systems are becoming more interdependent. In addition, net load profiles and availability or adequacy of thermal generation fleet are challenged by more frequent extreme weather events and large load additions. This talk discusses market reforms and technology initiatives at MISO to manage the energy transition. Identifying critical flexibility and reliability attributes and ensuring these attributes are obtained through markets when and where needed are important to reliably and efficiently operate the grid such as MISO’s dynamic reserve and ancillary service deliverability efforts. As many industries adopt Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), MISO is also developing multiple use cases across its markets, operations and transmission planning sectors. Particularly, MISO is building a cloud-based Uncertainty Platform to enable control room centralized situational awareness and data-driven decisions to manage uncertainties in dynamic and probabilistic faction. MISO is also collaborating with its research partners to evaluate emerging transmission technologies and grid following and grid forming services from Inverter-Based Resources.
April 3, 2025
Amanda Ullman, IES: Incorporating Underrepresented Voices and Places into Energy Transition Planning
Internal Speaker
Biography
Amanda Ullman is IES’s new Research Specialist. She recently completed her PhD in Energy Planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in May 2024 and her Master of Environmental Management at Duke University (Energy Concentration) in 2020. She is a mixed methods researcher, blending tools like energy modeling, ethnographic research, and literature reviews to develop holistic understandings of global energy systems. In her doctoral research, Amanda used life cycle assessment and ethnographic fieldwork from a Fulbright Fellowship in La Guajira, Colombia to evaluate the environmental and social impacts of policies for sustainable and just energy transitions, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Her recent postdoctoral work has assessed the local impacts of repurposing abandoned oil and gas wells for geothermal heat extraction.In her role as a Research Specialist for IES, Amanda will be facilitating grant proposal development and energy research at U-M through ideation, grant writing, team coordination, and project management. Her aim is to help foster interdisciplinary research and community building across U-M faculty and disciplines.
Abstract
Proponents of a “Just Energy Transition” call for the benefits and harms accompanying sustainable energy systems to be fairly distributed, repairing injustices from historic energy development and preventing future injustices by ensuring that communities are properly supported through changing energy markets and landscapes. However, the dominant theoretical roots and voices in Just Transition planning have Anglo-European origins. Underrepresentation of perspectives from Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East, the African Continent, and Asia and the Pacific may predispose Just Transition plans to structures and philosophies that privilege Anglo-European perspectives. This talk will discuss how quantitative and qualitative tools can help support holistic understandings of energy transitions in low-and-middle-income countries and highlight current gaps in global Just Transition planning. Tools discussed include life cycle assessment, ethnographic interviews, and comparative policy analysis. A case study of La Guajira, Colombia is highlighted to illustrate areas of (mis)alignment between global policies and community conceptualizations of justice in sustainability transitions. Together, these holistic mix of tools can serve to strengthen coordination of global Just Transition plans and improve their applicability to under-represented communities around the world.
April 10, 2025
Clifford Ho, Sandia National Labs: An Overview of Concentrating Solar Power: Opportunities and Challenges
Hosted by Rohini Bala Chandran
Biography
Dr. Cliff Ho is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and senior scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, where he has worked since 1993 on problems involving solar energy, energy storage, water safety and sustainability, heat- and mass-transfer processes in porous media, microchemical sensor systems for environmental monitoring, nuclear waste management, modeling of airborne pathogen transport and exposure-risk mitigations, and industrial decarbonization. Dr. Ho has authored over 300 scientific papers, holds over 20 patents, and is author and co-editor of three books. He received an Outstanding Professor Award at the University of New Mexico in 1997, and he received the national Asian American Engineer of the Year Award in 2010. Dr. Ho received an R&D 100 Award in 2013 for his development of the Solar Glare Hazard Analysis Tool, and an R&D 100 Award in 2016 for the development of the Falling Particle Receiver for Concentrating Solar Energy. In 2008, he won Discover magazine’s “The Future of Energy in Two-Minutes-or Less” video contest.
From 2022 to 2024, Cliff was on an extended assignment in Washington D.C., serving as a legislative fellow in U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich’s office advising on energy and climate issues.
Abstract
Concentrating solar power (CSP) uses a large array of mirrors to focus sunlight onto a receiver containing a heat-transfer fluid, which absorbs the high heat flux (~100 – 1000 times the sun’s irradiance). A heat engine (e.g., Rankine cycle, Stirling cycle) then converts the heat to mechanical work to generate electricity. CSP systems can produce utility-scale power (hundreds of megawatts) and can store large amounts of thermal energy (gigawatt-hours) for energy production at night or when the sun is not shining. The ability to store large amounts of energy cheaply and reliably gives CSP an advantage over other variable renewable energy sources such as wind and photovoltaics. This presentation will provide an overview and history of CSP, current challenges, and opportunities to address needs in electricity production, industrial heating, and transportation fuels.
Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525.
April 17, 2025 – 1706 CHEM, 12:00 – 1:30 PM
Ivan A. Moreno-Hernandez, Duke University: Understanding Activation and Degradation of Oxygen-evolving Electrocatalysts Across Spatiotemporal Domains
Hosted by Bart Bartlett
Biography
Prof. Ivan A. Moreno-Hernandez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Duke University. His current research interests focus on the application of electrochemistry to renewable energy, with an emphasis on understanding the structural dynamics of electrochemical materials with liquid phase transmission electron microscopy and the design of next-generation electrocatalysts. Ivan received his B.S. degree in Chemistry and Physics with University Honors from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2014, and his PhD degree as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 2019. His research at Caltech with Prof. Nathan S. Lewis focused on the study of earth- abundant materials for anodic reactions in acidic electrolytes. Ivan was a postdoctoral scholar from 2019 to 2022 in the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, working with Prof. A. Paul Alivisatos on the study of nanomaterials with liquid phase transmission electron microscopy. His independent scholarship has been recognized by several awards, including being named a 35 Under 35 Materials Scientist by Matter, two Scialog Fellow distinctions, an ACS Petroleum Research Fund Doctoral New Investigator award, and an NSF CAREER award.
Abstract
Electrocatalysis has the potential to enable sustainable energy and chemical infrastructures via the generation of commodity chemicals with renewable energy, but electrochemical devices often exhibit inadequate activity and stability due to poor catalyst performance for the oxygen evolution reaction (OER). The Moreno-Hernandez Laboratory specializes in designing new nanomaterials for next-generation energy devices via a multiscale feedback loop that integrates the precise synthesis of nanomaterials, atomic-scale observations of structural dynamics in liquid environments with transmission electron microscopy, and the assessment of electrocatalyst performance under relevant operating conditions. Integration of these approaches has resulted in the discovery of key OER degradation pathways due to nanoscale effects that were previously unknown, the rational design of complex noble metal oxides that exhibit improved catalytic performance towards the OER due to chemical and structural modifications, and the design of low-iridium OER electrocatalysts with that exhibit improved durability under operation. Our studies highlight the importance of multimodal approaches to guide material design and motivate further study of nanoscale effects that can be harnessed to design efficient, earth-abundant, and durable electrocatalysts for sustainable chemical transformations.