The Arthur Nozik Lecture Series honors the research and career of Prof. Nozik, who has been a leader in the thriving ecosystem of renewable energy research that has developed along the front range over the last four decades. This lecture was recorded on December 9, 2024.

Biography:

Matthew C. Beard is a senior laboratory research fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Director of the Center for Hybrid Organic Inorganic Semiconductors for Energy (CHOISE) and Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) funded by the Office of Science within DOE.  Beard is also a Fellow of the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute a joint research institute between NREL and CU Boulder and an Adjoint professor within the Chemistry department of Colorado School of Mines.  Beard has been at NREL since 2003 (working for Arthur Nozik) and before that graduated from the Yale Chemistry Department where he received his Ph.D. degree developing non-contact ultrafast probes of carrier dynamics in semiconductors and semiconductor nanocrystals with Charlie Schmuttenmaer.  Beard also served as Associate director for the Center for Advanced Solar Photophysics.  Beard is a fellow of the AAAS, American Physical Society, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. Beard is listed a Clarivate highly cited researcher from 2023-2018 with over 200 publications.  Beard was awarded the 2020 H.M. Hubbard award, the 2022 E.O. Lawarence Award from DOE, the RSC Chemical Dynamics award, and NREL’s highest impact paper in 2024.  Beard serves on the editorial boards of Phyiscal Review Letters (divisional editor), ACS Energy Letters and Journal of Chemical Physics.  He has 10 patents and patent applications under review and given  > 150 invited presentations, including being named the 2024 Alexander Cruickshank Gordon research conference lecturer, the 2022 McElvain lecturer at U. of Wisconsin, and the 2024 William Chupka Lecturer at Yale University.

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Named a 2022 MacArthur Fellow for her work investigating the scale of plastic pollution and galvanizing efforts to address plastic waste, Prof. Jenna Jambeck is the Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor of Environmental Engineering in the University of Georgia College of Engineering. Jambeck is internationally recognized for her research on plastic waste in the ocean and for the Marine Debris Tracker app she co-created with fellow faculty member Kyle Johnsen. She notes that being active in research helps bring current environmental engineering issues into the classroom for students.

Jenna presented the 2023 Nozik Lecture on Tuesday December 12, 2023 at 4:00 PM, which was followed by a poster reception. We had a fantastic turnout, with more than 120 interested folks attending the presentation and sticking around to discuss research in the poster session.

Stories from Sea to Source: Reducing Plastic Pollution

Plastic debris and its impacts in the environment have been widely documented, but the quantity entering the ocean from land was previously unknown. By linking worldwide data on solid waste, population density, and economic status, Dr. Jambeck made the first estimate of plastics entering our ocean globally. Cumulative global plastic production reached 8 billion metric tons in 2017. 6.4 billion metric tons has become waste that has overwhelmed some waste management systems around the world that have not been able to keep up infrastructure with economic growth. In addition, the global trade of plastic waste intended for recycling has influenced what countries can do with plastic as a recycled material with economic impacts worldwide. Shifting to where the burden of plastics is carried, the community level, Dr. Jambeck and her team created the Circularity Assessment Protocol (CAP). CAP is a rigorous, cost-effective toolkit for assessing materials management systems at the community level which has been used in 51 cities in 14 countries. Dr. Jambeck will not only discuss the methods and results of her research, but also impacts and related policies around the world. She will present an intervention framework to reduce plastic ending up in our environment while sharing stories of integrating technology and citizen science, science communication, and community-level efforts to address plastic pollution around the globe.

Biography

Dr. Jenna Jambeck is a Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor in Environmental Engineering at the University of Georgia, a 2022 MacArthur Fellow, Founder of the Circularity Informatics Lab in the New Materials Institute and a National Geographic Explorer. She has been conducting research on solid waste issues for over 25 years and marine debris/plastic pollution for 22 years. Her work has been recognized by the global community and translated into policy discussions by the High-Level Panel for the Ocean, testimony to Congress, in G7 and G20 Declarations, and the United Nations Environment program. She has conducted public environmental diplomacy as an International Informational Speaker for the US Department of State since 2017. This has included multiple global programs of speaking events, meetings, presentations to governmental bodies, and media outreach around the world including Chile, Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, South Africa, Vietnam, Jordan, Israel, South Korea, India, Taiwan and China. She has won awards for her teaching and research in the College of Engineering and the UGA Creative Research Medal, as well as a Public Service and Outreach Fellowship. In 2014 she sailed across the Atlantic Ocean with 13 other women in eXXpedition to sample land and open ocean plastic and encourage women to enter STEM disciplines. In 2019 she co-led the first ever women-led expedition team for National Geographic conducting comprehensive research on plastic pollution in the Ganga River Basin. She and her research team lead the science component of the Mississippi River Plastic Pollution Initiative along with the Mayors along the Mississippi and UNEP North America. She is co-developer of the mobile app Marine Debris Tracker, a tool that continues to facilitate a growing global citizen science initiative. The app and citizen science program has documented the location of nearly eight million litter and marine debris items documented in our environment throughout the world. Follow her work on Instagram @JennaJambeck

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has been a Professor at Caltech since 1988, an active leader in the solar fuels / solar chemical field for over 40 years. Prof. Lewis has published over 600 papers, presented hundreds of public and technical lectures and has worked with researchers from across the world in exploring the development of solar fuels.

Nate presented the inaugural 2022 Nozik Lecture on Monday August 29, 2022. The turnout was fantastic, both in person and online, with a full, but socially distant room. Making an afternoon of the proceedings Nate gave two talks, one looking at big picture methods for the decarbonization of the U.S Electricity Grid, the second taking a very technical deep dive into chemical materials that can “see” light.

Reliable Decarbonized U.S. Electricity Systems

Prof. Nathan Lewis | Caltech

Monday August 29, 2022 | 1:30 PM

SEEC Auditorium C120

Using a data-driven approach based on 39 years of hourly weather data to derive the variability of the wind and solar resource across the contiguous U.S., we analyze the gaps between supply and historical demand that would be present in an electricity system in which generation was provided by variable wind and solar resources.  We then assess the dynamical relationships and in an idealized system assess the cost-effectiveness of various approaches to satisfy resource adequacy planning requirements, including overbuilding and extensive curtailment of variable renewable generation assets, short and long term storage embodied by batteries, flow batteries and power-to-gas-to-power, flexible nuclear generation, and flexible loads such as generation of hydrogen or electrofuels.  We additionally have assessed the implications of regionalization of generation assets and load-balancing regions such as California or the Western Interconnect on the needs for flexibility and storage in view of the increased variability and frequency and duration of resource droughts that occurs as the generation and load-balancing regions are confined geographically.  In California, we additionally show that addition of existing hydroelectric generation slightly increases the need for long-duration storage as opposed to decreasing it, due to the seasonal mismatch between hydroelectric generation and electricity demand.  The analyses moreover emphasize the need for multi-year planning to ensure resource adequacy in systems that have large contributions of generation from variable renewables.

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Inorganic Phototropic Growth of Materials that See the Light

Prof. Nathan Lewis | Caltech

Monday August 29, 2022 | 4:00 PM

SEEC Auditorium C120

We have discovered a materials phenomenon, which we term inorganic phototropic growth, in which materials grow in real time, in 3-D space, towards a uniform intensity, uncorrelated beam of low intensity light, as occurs in for example palm trees, sunflowers, and corals.  The growth results in the rapid, light-directed formation of anisotropic complex, three-dimensional mesoscale morphologies of materials over macroscopic areas, providing access to nanostructures and morphologies that can not readily be made by any other method.  The phenomenon transcends traditional chemical and engineering disciplines: no lasers, no physical masks, no lithographic processing, no direct-write technology, no far-field modulation, no templates, and no chemical agents (ligands, surfactants) are used to direct the patterning, but full 3-D control is obtainable over the resulting morphology of the structure by manipulation the properties of the incident lightstimuli during growth. The nanostructures are created in a single-step synthesis and are determined both by the inherent response of the electronic processes within semiconductors to the presence of light, and by thetunable properties (e.g. wavelength, polarization, and direction) of light present during the electrodeposition. We have experimentally explored this emergent phenomenon by determining how specific optical inputs encode for specific morphologies, and have developed a model that accurately reproduces the experimentally observed nanostructures for the optical inputs and material systems explored thus far. Our work to date has been focused on the growth of Group II-VI materials (i.e. Se-Te alloys and PbSe); however, we expect that theemerging phenomenon underlying the growth process will prove general for the electrodeposition of semiconductors in the presence of light. We provide a brief overview of our work to date, and outline research directions designed to provide the further scientific insight into the processes behind this novel route to nanoscale and mesoscale materials design and synthesis that will be essential to the development of future technologies that exploit the phenomenon.

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