Friday, September 19, 2008

MIT Energy Initiative names 17 grant recipients

By Mass High Tech Staff

The MIT Energy Initiative has announced its second round of campus seed grants to 17 projects addressing issues ranging from alternative energy to environmentally friendly materials. The projects will split the more than $1.7 million in funding raised from MITEI’s founding and sustaining members, as well as the Singapore-MIT Alliance, the Chesonis Family Foundation, David desJardins and other private donors.

New grants will be awarded twice a year, over the course of the next five years, according to officials. The first round of grant recipients was announced in January.

The new seed grant recipients are:

• Harold Abelson (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) for PACEM: cooperative control for citywide energy management
• Markus Buehler (Civil and Environmental Engineering) for bioinspired hierarchical thermal materials
• Gerbrand Ceder (Materials Science and Engineering) for a high-throughput computational approach to finding novel thermoelectric materials
• Anantha Chandrakasan (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) for self-powered electronic systems
• Alan Edelman (Mathematics) and Stephen Connors (MIT Energy Initiative) for an interdisciplinary, high-scale computing and algorithmic approach to Energy Initiative computational science
• John Fernandez (Architecture), Michael Flaxman (Urban Studies and Planning), and John Sterman (Sloan School of Management) for a regionally integrated systems dynamics and energy and material flow model for the Ica region of Peru
• Eugene Fitzgerald (Materials Science and Engineering) and Mayank Bulsara (Materials Processing Center) for scalable thermoelectric power with novel thin film technology
• Harold Hemond (Civil and Environmental Engineering) and Ahmed Ghoniem (Mechanical Engineering) for solar PV-thermal hybrid for renewable energy generation in developing countries
• John G. Kassakian (Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems) and Marin Soljacic (Physics) for enabling efficient energy generation with photonic crystals
• Judith Layzer (Urban Studies and Planning) for researching urban energy initiatives’ effectiveness in reducing cities’ carbon footprints
• Carol Livermore (Mechanical Engineering) for carbon nanotube super-springs for energy storage
• Benjamin Olken (Economics) for researching the social and economic impact of micro-scale hydroelectric power design for a randomized experiment in rural Indonesia
• Rajeev Ram (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) for solar thermoelectric generators for the developing world
• Donald Sadoway (Materials Science and Engineering) for supervalent batteries
• Alexander Slocum (Mechanical Engineering) and James Kirtley (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) for an offshore renewable energy system for generation and storage
• Gregory Stephanopoulos (Chemical Engineering) for researching engineering tolerance in yeast for improved biofuel production
• Paul Woskov (Plasma Science and Fusion Center) and Daniel Cohn (MIT Energy Initiative) for millimeter wave deep drilling for geothermal energy, natural gas, and oil