Lucas Caretta, the Howard M. Reisman ’76 P’09 assistant professor of engineering at Brown University, has been awarded a Faculty Early Career Development grant from the National Science Foundation.

NCSE announced the winners of the Friend of the Planet award for 2025: The CLEO Institute, a non-profit organization seeking to build climate literacy and mobilize climate action, directed by Yoca Arditi-Rocha; Kim Cobb, a climate scientist and gifted climate communicator at Brown University (formerly at Georgia Institute of Technology); and John Toohey-Morales, a Florida-based atmospheric and environmental scientist who was among the first broadcast meteorologists to emphasize climate change on the air.

A new APS report, co-written by ISE Core Faculty Member and APS President-elect Brad Marston, outlines the challenges of scrubbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Applications to the one-year, on-campus program will close on May 1. Nitin Padture, a professor of engineering and the director of the ISE said “We really need an educated workforce who can understand what’s going on (and) how to transform from a historically carbon-based economy to a decarbonized economy."

Francis J. Doyle III, Provost of Brown University, announced the appointment of Prof. Greg Hirth, a professor of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences, as Brown’s next Vice President for Research. He is also a core faculty member of the Initiative for Sustainable Energy (ISE).

This article includes commentary from Professor of Engineering Nitin Padture, Director of Initiative for Sustainable Energy (ISE), on the life expectancies of different types of solar cells.

Twenty-five faculty members and three emeriti faculty of Brown Engineering have been recognized among the world’s top two percent of scientists in 2024, according to Stanford/Elsevier’s Top 2% Scientist Rankings. Among them, eight are core faculty members of the Initiative for Sustainable Energy. They are Andrew Peterson, Angus Kingon, Brian Sheldon, Daniel Mittleman, Franklin Goldsmith, Pradeep Guduru, Nitin Padture, Yue Qi,

Initiative for Sustainable Energy and School of Engineering jointly hosted a Poster Session at the Engineering Research Center.

Subra Suresh Symposium at the Frontiers of Technology and Society in honor of Prof. Subra Suresh has been established at Brown University through a generous endowment gift. A recent recipient of the National Medal of Science, Prof. Suresh is former Director of the National Science Foundation, and former President of Carnegie Mellon University and Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). He is currently Professor-at-Large at Brown University. The symposium series, planned to be a day-long event held every two years, will cover the broad, interconnected and multidisciplinary intellectual domains of science and engineering, and the impact of scientific discoveries on technology and society.

The theme of the inaugural 2024 Symposium is “Sustainable Energy,” and it is scheduled for Thursday, September 19, 2024 on the Brown University campus (in-person only) — you all are invited! The broad topics that will be covered through talks and panel discussions include: renewable energy conversion/storage, sustainable fuels/materials, and energy efficiency. Brown University Provost Francis Doyle will be on hand to inaugurate the Symposium. Several distinguished scientists and engineers will be on the program. Steven Chu (Stanford University Professor, Nobel Laureate, former U.S. Energy Secretary) will deliver the opening plenary lecture. Sarah Kurtz (UC Merced Professor, National Academy of Engineering Member) will give the keynote lecture. Ashish Jha (Dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University, former White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator) will speak at the dinner. There will be three panels: (1) “Closing the Carbon Cycle,” (2) “Bridging the Energy-Storage Scalability Gap,” and (3) “Sustainable Energy Entrepreneurship.” We are also planning a Poster Session to showcase sustainable-energy research by Brown University students and postdocs.