Solving the Energy and Climate Simultaneous Equation/Nanofluidics: From Ionic and Molecular Transport to Cryo-EM Imaging
MIE Department Seminar
November 26, 2019
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Location
CARDINAL Room in Student Center East (SCE)
Address
750 S Halsted St., Chicago, IL 60612
Calendar
Download iCal FilePresenter: Arun Majumdar, Jay Precourt Provostial Chair Professor, Stanford University
Abstracts:
I. Solving the Energy and Climate Simultaneous Equation
Energy use is the basis of all modern economies. With 80 percent of the primary energy still coming from fossil fuels, the environmental imperatives warrant fierce urgency to address them at scale. This is arguably the defining challenge of the 21st century. While technological innovations and cost reductions in unconventional oil and gas, renewable electricity from solar and wind, as well as lithium-ion batteries offer optimism, they are insufficient to decarbonize the global energy system to keep the global average temperature rise below 2oC. How can we accelerate transition to a more sustainable energy system? What new technologies or policies do we need to create? This 20-minute talk will offer a call to action in science, technology, policy and governance to provide a proportional response to address climate change.
II. Nanofluidics: From Ionic and Molecular Transport to Cryo-EM Imaging
The intermolecular forces - van der Waals, electrostatic or steric - between molecules and between molecules and solid surfaces apply in the range of 1-10 nm. Hence, when liquids are confined to these length scales, they undergo a variety of transitions that control the liquid, ionic and macromolecular transport, as well as liquid-vapor phase transitions. This 20-minute talk will discuss our past experimental and theoretical work on nanofluidic transport. This is now forming the basis of a new effort using cryo-electron microscopy to image ions and molecules and address some of the key knowledge gaps in this field that relate to phase transitions and separations, as well as ion selectivity and correlation.
Speaker Biography:
Dr. Arun Majumdar is co-director of the Precourt Institute for Energy, which integrates and coordinates research and education across all seven Schools and the Hoover Institute at Stanford. His current research interests focus on a sustainable energy future, nanoscale imaging and microscopy, and data science for the electricity grid.
He has been the Almy & Agnes Maynard Professor at UC, Berkeley and Associate Laboratory Director for Energy and Environment at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He was the Founding Director of ARPA-E, and served as the Acting Under Secretary of Energy. He was a Senior Advisor to the Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, and participated in the high-level team that helped stop the leak in the Deep Water Horizon oil spill. After leaving Washington DC, Dr. Majumdar served as VP for Energy at Google.
Dr. Majumdar is a member of NAE and AAAS. He served as Science Envoy for the US Department of State with focus on energy and technology innovation in the Baltics and Poland. He serves as an advisor to several energy entities, and is a member of the Board of Directors of EPRI .
Host: Dr. Farzad Mashayek
Date posted
Oct 11, 2019
Date updated
Nov 13, 2019