The REU Site: Research on Sustainable Energy Technology and Systems (ROSETAS) – a 10-week summer research program for undergraduate students from across the country interested in sustainable energy that is hosted by the Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute (ROSEI) – recently finished its first year with a well-attended final symposium that featured posters and presentations by all nine of the program’s participants.
“It was a great first year for ROSETAS,” said Susanna Thon, the associate director of ROSEI and faculty lead for ROSETAS. “We had students from schools nationwide, including primarily undergraduate institutions and community colleges, come to the Homewood campus to be active members in the labs of ROSEI faculty members. I think we did a great job of furthering our participants’ interest in pursuing sustainable energy research at the graduate level and in their future careers.”
In all, nine different labs participated in the program, including:
- Yury Dvorkin, Electrical and Computer Engineering & Civil and Systems Engineering
- Dennice Gayme, Mechanical Engineering
- Yayuan Liu, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
- Charles Meneveau, Mechanical Engineering
- Corey Oses, Materials Science and Engineering
- Grace Panetti, Chemistry
- Ben Schafer, Civil and Systems Engineering
- Sara Thoi, Chemistry
- Susanna Thon, Electrical and Computer Engineering
The 2025 ROSETAS participants with Susanna Thon (R) and Julie Lirot (L)
The different research backgrounds of the labs resulted in a final symposium that touched upon a variety of ways to combat climate change.
“So many REU’s are hyper specific in what they teach their students, and I love that we are able to attract different kinds of students to ROSETAS,” Thon said. “The symposium ended up being a great reflection of ROSEI’s strengths –the diversity of researchers we have that work on the energy transition from various perspectives. We’re a multi-disciplinary institute that likes to engage in dialogues across many fields.”
The different research interests of the group also didn’t prevent the participants from creating camaraderie together, which was enhanced by outside-of-the-lab excursions, such as touring the labs at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL), participating in workshops and attending a Baltimore Orioles baseball game together.
“Being part of a community of peers who were also tackling hard problems helped me stay motivated and feel less alone in moments of uncertainty,” one participant wrote in their reflection on the program. “This REU helped me see what a career in research might look like. It gave me insight into how graduate school differs from undergraduate school, what makes a good research question, and how flexible or creative a research career can be.”
