2024 Symposium
2024 Resnick Young Investigators Symposium
The Resnick Young Investigators Symposium celebrates innovators in the science and technology of sustainability. The program highlights young researchers whose work shows great promise in tackling key science and engineering challenges in sustainability.
Friday, April 5, 2024, 1:00-5:00 PM in Chen 100 Lecture Hall
2024 Speaker Lineup
Gözde Demirer
Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering, California Institute or Technology
Nano- and Biotechnologies for Improved Plant Genetic Engineering
About Gözde
Professor Demirer was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey and completed her Chemical Engineering Ph.D. at UC Berkeley, where she developed nanotechnologies for plant genetic engineering in the Landry lab. During her postdoc at UC Davis, Professor Demirer studied nutrient use efficiency of tomato and established high-throughput functional genomics tools to study transcriptional regulation in crops. She joined Caltech CCE in September 2022. The Demirer lab currently has 10 members across disciplines and diverse backgrounds, and the team works on bioengineering of plants and rhizosphere for food security, sustainability, and climate change resiliency using novel nanotechnology and synthetic biology approaches.
Xiaojing (Ruby) Fu
Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Civil Engineering, California Institute of Technology
Tracing the fate of water through snow
About Ruby
Ruby has a strong interest in the physics of multiphase fluid mechanics through porous media and how it shapes our natural and engineered environments. Her work is applied to a wide range of geoscience problems, including glacial and snow hydrology, permafrost and hydrate-bearing sediments, soil biogeochemistry and carbon cycle and geologic carbon sequestration.
Ruby received her BS summa cum laude in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from Clarkson University, her MS in Computational Engineering and PhD in Civil & Environmental Engineering from MIT. She is awarded the Miller Fellowship at UC Berkeley in 2018. In 2023, she is awarded the Best PhD Thesis at the International Conference on Gas Hydrates (ICGH10). She joined Department of Mechanical and Civil Engineering at Caltech in 2021.
Carlos Morales-Guio
Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles
Multiscale reaction-transport kinetics in the electrochemical reduction of CO2 on copper catalysts
About Carlos
Carlos Morales-Guio is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interest is in electrochemical catalysis, particularly with respect to energy and chemical transformations for sustainable energy applications. Over the last five years much of his group's efforts have been geared towards understanding and quantifying the role of mass, heat and charge transport in electrocatalysis.
Carlos received his B. Eng. degree in Chemical Engineering from Osaka University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne working under the supervision of Prof. Xile Hu. Before joining UCLA in the fall of 2018, Carlos was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University in the group of Prof. Thomas Jaramillo. Carlos is a recipient of the Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) Award 2017 and is a Scialog Fellow on Negative Emission Sciences.
William Tarpeh
Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering, by courtesy, of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Center Fellow, by courtesy, at the Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University
Catalytic Separations for Electrochemical Wastewater Nitrogen Refining
About William
William Tarpeh is an assistant professor of chemical engineering at Stanford University. The Tarpeh Lab develops and evaluates catalysis and separation separations in "waste" waters across length scales from molecular engineering of reaction microenvironments to novel unit processes and environmental assessments. Will completed his B.S. in chemical engineering at Stanford, his M.S. and Ph.D. in environmental engineering at UC Berkeley, and postdoctoral training at the University of Michigan in environmental engineering. Recent awards recognizing his group's work include the Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, AIChE 35 Under 35 and the Environmental Division Early Career Award, and the Electrochemical Society Young Investigator Fellowship.
2024 Program
2024 Program
1:00 PM - Opening Comments
1:05 PM - Multiscale Reaction-transport Kinetics in the Electrochemical Reduction of CO2 on Copper Catalysts
Dr. Carlos Morales-Guio, Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles
1:55 PM - Nano and Biotechnology Development for Plant and Planet Health
Dr. Gözde Demirer, Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering, California Institute or Technology
2:45 PM - 30-Minute Break (with refreshments in Chen breezeway)
3:15 PM - Tracing the Fate of Meltwater Through Snow
Dr. Xiaojing (Ruby) Fu, Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Civil Engineering, California Institute of Technology
4:05 PM - Catalytic Separations for Electrochemical Wastewater Nitrogen Refining
Dr. William Tarpeh, Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering, by courtesy, of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Center Fellow, by courtesy, at the Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University