The Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute (ROSEI) celebrated its two-year birthday and Earth Day by hosting a party for Hopkins students, faculty, and staff in the Clipper Room of Shriver Hall on April 21. While ROSEI’s 2022 Earth Day celebration was the first public-facing event ROSEI hosted, this year’s iteration represented the end of a successful academic year for the institute.

“I’m really happy with ROSEI’s growth and development throughout this year,” said Ben Schafer, ROSEI’s director. “In just our second year, ROSEI has managed to make serious inroads in our major research initiatives and partnerships. We’ve also grown more into a community with a variety of events and expanded our work with a growing list of affiliated faculty, scientists and postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates. We will even be launching our first program for high school students this summer. All in all, Year 2 of ROSEI has been great, and it was wonderful to celebrate with a party amongst friends.”

In addition to providing lunch and cake for the party’s (over 100) guests, faculty leaders from each of ROSEI’s four research pillars – Jonah Erlebacher for Carbon, Susanna Thon for Storage, Dennice Gayme for Wind and Enrique Mallada for Grid – provided updates on the work being done in their areas.

This celebration is the final major event of ROSEI’s for the academic year. In total, ROSEI either hosted or sponsored 29 events during the 2022-23 academic year, including hosting a translation to market workshop in September, an all-day summit for sustainable energy research at JHU in January and being the platinum partner (as part of a Whiting School for Engineering effort) for the ARPA-E Innovation Summit in March.

ROSEI plans to continue to host events next year. Please contact ROSEI if you would like more information about next year’s events or would like to get involved with the institute.