Every day, in labs, offices, and studios around campus, members of the Penn community are part of the solution to the climate emergency. At this anchor event for Climate Week, hear from faculty and researchers from the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Weitzman School of Design about the technologies and designs they are innovating to create a safer, more resilient, more sustainable future.
Refreshments will be served. Open to all.
Jennifer Wilcox is Presidential Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering and Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, with a home at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy and the School of Engineering and Applied Science. At Penn, she oversees the Clean Energy Conversions Lab.
Wilcox is also a senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, where she leverages her expertise to help accelerate policy support and investments in research, development, and deployment of industrial decarbonization and carbon removal solutions in order to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.
Most recently, Wilcox served as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management at the Department of Energy. Before coming to Penn, she was the James H. Manning Chaired Professor of Chemical Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Dorit Aviv, PhD, AIA is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design, where she directs the Thermal Architecture Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory focused on the intersection of thermodynamics, architectural design, and material science. Her work examines how architectural materials and forms can impact airflows, energy interactions, and human health. She is a licensed architect and holds a PhD in architectural technology from Princeton University. Her current projects include a distributed environmental sensing network, development of radiative cooling for hot-humid climates, a combined evaporative and radiative cooling prototype for desert climate, and indoor environmental quality control and assessment technologies.
Masoud Akbarzadeh is a designer with a unique academic background and experience in architectural design, computation, and structural engineering. He is an Assistant Professor of Architecture in Structures and Advanced Technologies and the Director of the Polyhedral Structures Laboratory (PSL). He holds a D.Sc. from the Institute of Technology in Architecture, ETH Zurich, where he was a Research Assistant in the Block Research Group. He holds two degrees from MIT: a Master of Science in Architecture Studies (Computation) and a MArch, the thesis for which earned him the renowned SOM award. He also has a degree in Earthquake Engineering and Dynamics of Structures from the Iran University of Science and Technology and a BS in Civil and Environmental Engineering. His main research topic is Three-Dimensional Graphical Statics, which is a novel geometric method of structural design in three dimensions. In 2020, he has received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award to extend the methods of 3D/Polyhedral Graphic Statics for Education, Design, and Optimization of High-Performance Structures.
Yingding Chi, a member of Shu Yang's laboratory, received a B.S. in Measurement and Control Technology and Instrumentation from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2014, a M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from University of Colorado Boulder in 2017 and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from North Carolina State University in 2022. His research interests include stimuli-responsive materials, mechanics guided soft robotics and mechanics and design of mechanical metamaterials.
Yunchan Lee, a member of Shu Yang's laboratory, received a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Hanyang University, South Korea in 2014 and a Ph.D. in Chemical and Biological Engineering from Seoul National University, South Korea in 2021. His research interests surface engineering on patterned films, design and fabrication of complex functional structures, controlling surface property, water harvesting materials and photonic structures.
Jerolmack received his undergraduate degree in Environmental Engineering from Drexel University, and his PhD in Geophysics from MIT. He is a professor in both the Departments of Earth and Environmental Science (EES) and Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM). Jerolmack's lab conducts experimental and field research on the physics of the environment, focusing on how flows of water, air and soil shape the landscape and affect humans. Much of his research examines the implications of climate change on landscapes through a mechanistic lens: for example, how increasing flood intensity reshapes rivers, how deserts expand, and what controls the formation and hazard potential of landslides and debris flows. Jerolmack teaches courses related to these topics in both EES and MEAM, and is passionate about helping to build an inclusive community of scientists and engineers to solve environmental problems.
Paulo E. Arratia obtained a B.S. in chemical engineering from Hampton University in 1997, and a Ph.D. in chemical and biochemical engineering from Rutgers University in 2003. He worked as a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Haverford College and then at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the recipient of the National Science Foundation Career Award in Fluid Dynamics. His research focuses on the dynamics of complex fluids, swimming, microfluidics, and interfacial phenomena.