2023 Annual Meeting
speakers and panelists
Keynote speaker
Amory B. Lovins
Adjunct Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University; Co-founder and Chairman Emeritus, RMI (Rocky Mountain Institute)
Physicist Amory Lovins is Cofounder (1982) and Chairman Emeritus of RMI (formerly Rocky Mountain Institute); author of 31 books and over 850 papers; a designer of superefficient buildings, vehicles, and industrial plants; and a half-century advisor to major firms and governments worldwide on advanced energy efficiency and strategy. He received the Blue Planet, Volvo, Zayed, Onassis, Nissan, Shingo, and Mitchell Prizes, MacArthur and Ashoka Fellowships, 12 honorary doctorates, the Heinz, Lindbergh, Right Livelihood, National Design, and World Technology Awards, and Germany’s Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz 1. Klasse). A Harvard and Oxford dropout, former Oxford don, honorary US architect, Swedish engineering academician, and 2011–18 member of the US National Petroleum Council, he has taught at ten universities and is currently an Adjunct Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford. In 2009, Time named him one of the world’s 100 most influential people, and Foreign Policy, one of the 100 top global thinkers.
Speakers and Panelists
Claire F. Gmachl
Interim Director of the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment; Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering; Head of Whitman College, Princeton University
Gmachl is interim director of the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Electrical Engineering, and head of Whitman College at Princeton University. Her research group works on the development of new quantum devices, especially lasers, and their optimization for systems applications ranging from sensors to optical communications. Gmachl received her Ph.D. in 1995 from the Technical University of Vienna (Austria). She worked for seven years at Bell Labs, where she worked on quantum cascade lasers. She joined Princeton University in 2003 and received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2005.
From 2006 to 2016, Gmachl directed the Engineering Research Center for Mid-Infrared Technologies for Health and the Environment (MIRTHE), headquartered at Princeton. MIRTHE is a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center with partners including the City College New York, Johns Hopkins University, Rice University, Texas A&M, and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. The center encompasses a world-class team of engineers, chemists, physicists, environmental and bioengineers, and medical doctors. MIRTHE developed infrared optical trace gas sensing systems based on new technologies, such as quantum cascade lasers or quartz-enhanced photo-acoustic spectroscopy, with the ability to detect minute amounts of chemicals found in the environment or atmosphere, emitted from spills, combustion, or natural sources, or exhaled in human breath.
Andrea J. Goldsmith
Dean, School of Engineering and Applied Science; Arthur LeGrand Doty Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Princeton University
Goldsmith is the Dean of Engineering and the Doty Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University. She was previously the Stephen Harris Professor of Engineering at Stanford University. She founded and served as CTO of Plume WiFi and of Quantenna (QTNA). She is a member of the Board of Directors for Intel (INTC), Medtronic (MDT), and Crown Castle Inc (CCI). She also serves on the Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Dr. Goldsmith is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Emily A. Carter
Senior Strategic Advisor and Associate Lab Director for Applied Materials and Sustainability Sciences at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment and Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, and Applied and Computational Mathematics, Princeton University
Emily A. Carter is the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment at Princeton University and Senior Strategic Advisor and Associate Laboratory Director at the Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). She was the Founding Director of the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, and then Dean of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton. Thereafter, she served as UCLA’s Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, and Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering before returning to Princeton and PPPL. The author of over 450 publications and patents, she has delivered nearly 600 invited/plenary lectures worldwide and serves on advisory boards spanning a wide range of disciplines. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including election to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, U.S. National Academy of Inventors, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, and the European Academy of Sciences.
Steven Cowley
Director, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory; Professor of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University
Cowley, a theoretical physicist and international authority on fusion energy, became the seventh director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in 2018, and a Princeton professor of astrophysical sciences. Most recently president of Corpus Christi College and professor of physics at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom since 2016, Cowley previously was chief executive officer of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and head of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy.
Ahmed Diallo
Program Director, ARPA-E; Distinguished Research Fellow, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
Diallo serves as the program director at ARPA-E, advancing commercial fusion energy through pioneering research. He is also the principal research physicist at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), where he spearheaded the Advanced Diagnostics Development Division. At PPPL, Diallo developed advanced diagnostic methods for microelectronics and fusion plasma studies. He also served as the deputy director for the Innovation Network for Fusion Energy (INFUSE), where he planned, directed, and evaluated research activities in partnership with national labs, universities. His notable awards encompass the U.S. Department of Energy’s Early Career Research Award, DOE Oppenheimer Fellow, and the PPPL Distinguished Research Fellow title. Prior to his PPPL tenure, Diallo was a Research Fellow at the Australian National University and a Post-Doctoral Scientist at the Swiss Plasma Center, Swiss Federal Technical Institute. He proudly holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Iowa.
David A. Gates
Chief Technology Officer, Thea Energy
Gates, the Chief Technology Officer at Thea Energy, was until recently the Head of the Advanced Projects Department of PPPL and the stellarator physics leader at the Laboratory. He also held a joint appointment as a Senior Research Scholar at the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment. David previously led collaborative efforts with the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator in Greifswald, Germany and also on the Large Helical Device in Toki, Japan. He served as the Principal Investigator of the ARPA-E project “Stellar Simplification using Permanent Magnets”. Prior to taking the role as stellarator leader, he was the leader of the NSTX Advanced Scenarios and Control topical science group as well as head of the Magneto-Hydrodynamic (“MHD”) Stability group. He also was a Physics Operator on NSTX. Gates did his undergraduate studies in Physics and Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and did his graduate studies at Columbia University where he received his M.S., M. Phil., and Ph.D. in Applied Physics. He was a research associate at Culham Laboratory in Oxfordshire, England from 1993-1997 where he worked on the COMPASS-D and START devices. Gates was a visiting professor at the National Institute for Fusion Science in Toki, Japan in 2010 and 2011. He became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2013.
Egemen Kolemen
Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, Princeton University
Kolemen’s research focuses on the application of dynamics and control theory to experimental plasma physics, primarily to address the challenges of fusion reactor design. He analyzes the dynamics of complex plasma phenomena using applied mathematics and control theory with the aim of designing and implementing novel control techniques, which is then used to build real-time control systems from the ground up. Current research includes reduction of the heat flux to the fusion reactor vessel using advanced magnetic divertor configuration, detachment, and radiation control; and disruption avoidance against instabilities such as Neoclassical Tearing Modes and Resistive Wall Modes.
Erika La Plante
Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Davis
La Plante is a co-founder and Head of MRV (Measurement, Reporting, and Verification) & Environmental Impact Assessment at Equatic, an ocean carbon removal company that accelerates and amplifies the ocean’s natural ability to absorb and permanently store atmospheric carbon. Her research at UCLA (where she was a postdoctoral researcher, project scientist, and lecturer) formed the basis of Equatic technology and helped the organization offer reliable, cost-effective, and scalable ocean carbon removal. La Plante is also an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the University of California, Davis. She has a B.S. in Geology and a Ph.D. in Geochemistry from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has produced multiple peer-reviewed publications on mineral reactivity and processing, cementitious materials, and carbon dioxide sequestration, and applies her expertise in the kinetics of low-temperature aqueous processes at mineral-fluid interfaces to address the many research questions in the fields of climate, sustainability, built environment, and energy.
Noah McQueen
Co-founder and Head of Research, Heirloom
McQueen is the head of research at Heirloom, a direct air capture company with the goal of removing one billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by 2035. McQueen’s expertise surrounds carbon capture and removal, with a focus on direct air capture and carbon mineralization technologies. Their expertise further includes techno-economic analysis and life cycle assessment to evaluate the technical and economic feasibility of carbon removal systems. McQueen holds a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.S. in chemical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines.
Michael Mueller
Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University
Mueller’s research interests encompass computational modeling of multi-physics turbulent reacting flows with applications to energy and propulsion, including combustion as well as offshore wind, fusion, and other energy conversion processes. In addition, his research interests extend to broader areas of computational and data sciences including uncertainty quantification, numerical algorithms for emerging parallel computing architectures, and data-based modeling and algorithms. Since 2020, he is jointly appointed as a Faculty Researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. He has been recognized through the Young Investigator Program of the Army Research Office (2017) and with a Research Excellence Award from The Combustion Institute (2020) and has also received the Princeton University Graduate Mentoring Award (2015) and been named to the Princeton Engineering Commendation List for Outstanding Teaching seven times between 2013 and 2020.
Barry Rand
Associate Director for External Partnerships, Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment; Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, Princeton University
Rand joined the Princeton University faculty in 2013. His research interests highlight the border between electrical engineering, materials science, chemistry, and applied physics, covering electronic and optoelectronic thin-films and devices. He has authored approximately 160 refereed journal publications and holds 25 issued U.S. patents. He has received several awards and accolades, including the 3M Nontenured Faculty Award (2014), DuPont Young Professor Award (2015), DARPA Young Faculty Award (2015), and ONR Young Investigator Program Award (2016). Rand earned a B.E. in electrical engineering from The Cooper Union in 2001 and received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Princeton University. From 2007 to 2013, he was at imec in Leuven, Belgium, ultimately as a principal scientist, researching the understanding, optimization, and manufacturability of thin-film solar cells.
