The Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute (ROSEI) hosted its third annual summit (Summit) for sustainable energy research at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) on January 15. The event brought together well over 100 people to learn about the various ways that people are combatting climate change at JHU.
Jeffrey Maranchi and Kostas Gerasopoulos
One of the highlights of this year’s Summit was an increased presence of speakers from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). After opening remarks from Ben Schafer, ROSEI’s director, the day of academic talks kicked off with the morning keynote featuring APL’s Jeffrey Maranchi – a research program area manager and a member of ROSEI’s leadership council – and Kostas Gerasopoulos – an assistant program manager and a ROSEI associate faculty member – discussing how APL approaches energy.
The morning keynote was the first of eight talks delivered by APL speakers.
“A goal of the ROSEI Summit is to get researchers in the same room to talk about potential collaborations. That was one of the primary reasons for having a heavy APL presence this year,” Schafer said. “APL is doing a lot of great energy work, but because they aren’t on the Homewood campus it can be tricky to get their researchers in the same room as ROSEI’s. Hopefully a lot of partnerships are spun out of getting everyone together.”
Lunch and a student poster competition featuring 26 different participants in the Glass Pavilion followed the morning agenda. 14 different faculty labs and all four ROSEI pillars were represented in the competition, and three different posters were selected as the winners of the competition:
- Amelia Adcroft, “Satellite Detection of Wind Farm Impacts on Sea Surface Waves” (from Julie Lundquist’s lab)
- Nan (Louise) Chen, “Synergistic Enhancement of Relative Permittivity and Breakdown Field Strength in Ultra-Dilute ZnSe/NiO Polystyrene Nanocomposite Dielectric Capacitors” (from Howard Katz’s lab)
- Hadas Elazar-Mittelman, “Carbon Dioxide Derived Carbon-Ceramic Composites by Chemical Vapor Infiltration” (jointly advised by Jonah Erlebacher and Michael Tsapatsis)
ROSEI Summit Student Poster Competition Winners with Ben Schafer (L to R): Nan (Louise) Chen, Hadas Elazar-Mittelman, Amelia Adcroft
“Educating the next generation of scholars that will contribute to the fight against climate change has been a core goal of ROSEI’s since the institute’s inception,” Schafer said. “We wanted to give students a platform to discuss and show the research they’re working on every day. It was great to see the wide range of methods that our students are using to further their research.”
The afternoon agenda was highlighted by two keynote speakers – Dan Kammen and Leonardo Meeus. Kammen – who is a member of the ROSEI advisory council – has founded or is on the board of over 10 companies, and has served the State of California and US federal government in expert and advisory capacities. His talk emphasized that across renewable energy, it is possible to implement technology, improve quality of life and advance efforts for climate change globally, and to not ignore the needs of the poor or other communities that have not had the same advantages as first world countries.
Dan Kammen
Meeus is the Director of the Florence School of Regulation, and is the first speaker from a foreign university to deliver a keynote speech at a ROSEI Summit. His talk looked at different avenues for advancing energy markets in constantly changing new political realities.
“I thought the two keynote talks in the afternoon were excellent. Really informative and a great resource for the Hopkins energy community,” Schafer said. “As we always have, ROSEI hopes to continue to host pioneers in the clean energy space on the Homewood campus. Keep an eye on our website for upcoming talks and ROSEI events.”
