Revolution Wind began delivering electricity to the New England grid on March 13. The new energy source from the 704-megawatt offshore wind farm, located about 15 miles off the Rhode Island coast.
Brown’s second annual Climate Career Fair will take place on Thursday, March 5, 2026, from 11:00 AM–2:00 PM in Alumnae Hall (Alumnae Auditorium), 194 Meeting Street, Providence, RI. The fair offers students the opportunity to connect with employers hiring for climate-related jobs and internships, and to engage with alumni for guidance on navigating climate career pathways.
Executive Director of the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship and Professor of the Practice of Engineering Danny Warshay was the recipient of a Fulbright Specialist Program award, from the U.S. Department of State and the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board.
This March, Brown will launch its first-ever Climate Week—a campus-wide celebration of ideas, innovation, and action for a sustainable future. It is an open invitation for students, faculty, alumni, and community members to come together to explore how research, policy, and practice intersect to drive meaningful climate solutions.
Brown University’s School of Engineering (SoE) invites applications from candidates for a Professor of the Practice position at the Associate or Full level in the area of Sustainable Energy.
Brown University engineers showed that applying a temperature gradient across a solid-state electrolyte blocks destructive dendrite growth, offering a practical solution to a major barrier in battery technology.
Research by Brown University engineers sheds new light on how sodium behaves inside these batteries, providing new design specifications for anode materials that maximize stability and energy density for sodium-ion batteries.
Brown University’s Joan Wernig Sorensen Professor of Engineering Yue Qi has been elected to the class of 2026 Fellows by the Materials Research Society (MRS). She joins Nitin Padture (2023) and Subra Suresh (2008) as Brown faculty members who are Fellows of the MRS. She joins Nitin Padture (2023) and Subra Suresh (2008) as Brown faculty members who are Fellows of the MRS.
Assistant Professor Joy Zeng, the newest chemical engineering professor to join the Brown School of Engineering, recognized the fundamental link between chemistry and nature even before she knew how to put it into words.
Associate Professor Feng Lin’s laboratory in Brown University’s School of Engineering leads pioneering studies using advanced materials and cell diagnostics analyses to systematically elucidate the degradation behavior of battery materials. B
Yue Qi, the Joan Wernig Sorensen Professor of Engineering at Brown University and member of ISE executive committee has received the 2025 Ross Coffin Purdy Award from The American Ceramic Society for a 2023 Nature Communications research paper. Presented annually, the Purdy honors the most valuable technical contribution to ceramic literature published two years prior. There were two awarded papers in 2025.
Fermi Energy, a startup which develops high-performance cathode materials for next-generation batteries, was pitched by Lin’s CEO and co-founder Zhengrui “Ray” Xu.
Nitin Padture who leads Brown’s Initiative for Sustainable Energy and other researchers from Brown University’s School of Engineering have discovered new details about how destructive cracks form in flexible electronic devices — and how to prevent them.
Lucas Caretta, assistant professor of engineering at Brown University, received the School of Engineering’s 2025 Hazeltine Innovation Awards. The award grants to underwrite early-stage faculty research projects with the potential to attract external funding and create a lasting broadbased impact.
The Aspen Daily News published Brad Marston’s article, “On Physics: Removing atmospheric CO2 to stop climate change: Can it be done?” on Jul 3, 2025.
Brad Marston is a climate and quantum physicist at Brown University and president-elect of the American Physical Society. He is the core faculty member of Initiative for Sustainable Energy since 2023.
Feng Lin has joined the Brown University School of Engineering as Associate Professor, with an appointment beginning July 1. He was also jointly appointed in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and affiliated with the Macromolecules Innovation Institute.
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."
Brown Engineering’s new on-campus master of science in sustainable energy will prepare students to tackle global climate change and lead the transition to a decarbonized energy future.
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,
A daylong conference brought together experts from Brown’s School of Engineering and beyond to spark collaborations in renewable energy, carbon capture and energy-efficient technologies for a sustainable future.
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.
The Initiative for Sustainable Energy (ISE) announced Seed Research Awards for 2024-25. This represents a total investment of over $200,000 by Brown University in early-stage innovative faculty research with the potential to attract significant external funding, and have a broad impact in the area of sustainable energy.
The inaugural Initiative for Sustainable Energy (ISE) Mini-Symposium was held on Thursday, May 16, 2024. This featured two Invited Talks by our own Profs. Yue Qi and Andrew Peterson (Engineering), together with five presentations, showcasing the ISE Seed projects, by: Profs. Brian Sheldon (Engineering), Shouheng Sun (Chemistry), Brad Marston (Physics), Greg Hirth (DEEPS), and Matthias Kuehne (Physics).
Brown’s culture of collaboration serves as a catalyst for enduring, actionable solutions to today’s most pressing climate, sustainability, and equity challenges – from rising sea levels to the health effects of air pollution.
Prof. Greg Hirth, Professor and Chair of the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences, was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the most prestigious honor societies.
The daylong conference brought together scientists, engineers and technical experts from Brown and the Department of Energy’s National Laboratories to strengthen existing partnerships and enable new collaborations.
The Initiative for Sustainable Energy (ISE) is pleased to announce the continuation of the Seed Funding Program, and solicits internal seed-project proposals in areas related to the three research thrusts of the ISE: renewable energy, sustainable fuels/materials, and energy efficiency.
Researchers found that one of the most promising electrolytes for designing longer lasting lithium batteries has complex nanostructures that act like micelle structures do in soaped water.
A Sustainable Energy Workshop was hosted successfully by the Initiative for Sustainable Energy (ISE) at Brown University over three days (October 25 – 27, 2023).
The Initiative for Sustainable Energy (ISE) announced the inaugural Seed Research Awards for 2023. This represents a total investment of over $400,000 by Brown University in early-stage innovative faculty research with the potential to attract significant external funding, and have a broad impact in the area of sustainable energy.
The newly launched Initiative for Sustainable Energy will serve as a campus hub for driving technological advances in sustainable energy and preparing the next-generation of leaders in net-zero-carbon energy solutions.
Brown University’s Otis E. Randall Professor of Engineering Nitin Padture has been elected to the class of 2023 Fellows by the Materials Research Society (MRS). Padture was cited ‘for sustained and distinguished contributions to materials research in the areas of advanced composites, high-temperature coatings, and emerging photovoltaics, and outstanding leadership and service to the broader materials community.’