2026 Symposium
2026 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, November 6, 2026, 10:00 AM - 3:30 PM in Resnick Sustainability Center, room 120
Coffee, mingling, and RSI poster session beginning at 9:30 AM
2026 Speaker Lineup
Iwnetim (Tim) Abate
John Chipman Career Development Professor & Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering | MIT
Harnessing Geological Electrons: Chemical Production in Earth and Planetary Subsurfaces
About Iwnetim
Iwnetim Abate is the John Chipman Career Development Professor and an Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research seeks to understand and control how redox reactions reshape matter across scales, enabling new approaches to sustainable energy storage and chemical production.
By integrating materials science, electrochemistry, geochemistry, catalysis, artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous experimentation, Abate's group has established design principles for earth-abundant battery materials and pioneered the concept of geological electrons—using naturally occurring minerals to drive the production of hydrogen and ammonia and the conversion of CO₂ into valuable carbon products. His work explores how these reactions can be harnessed in Earth and planetary subsurfaces as distributed environments for producing fuels and chemicals.
Abate earned his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford University and subsequently served as both a Miller Fellow and a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. Before his doctoral studies, he conducted research at IBM Almaden Research Center and Los Alamos National Laboratory.
His honors include MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35, Chemical & Engineering News' Talented 12, an MIT Bose Fellowship, and the Young Investigator Award from the International Society for Solid State Ionics. He leads an ARPA-E-funded project on geological hydrogen and co-founded Addis Energy to commercialize his group's invention of geological ammonia, a process with the potential to substantially reduce the emissions and costs of ammonia production.
Outside the lab, Abate is a co-founder and president of SciFro, a nonprofit that empowers African youth to address local challenges through scientific research and innovation. SciFro has received support from the Gates Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the American Physical Society.
Enabling earth-abundant energy storage and conversion devices
About Chibueze
Chibueze Amanchukwu is a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, a faculty affiliate in the Data Science Institute, and a joint appointee at Argonne National Laboratory. His research is focused on (1) developing earth-abundant and intrinsically safe batteries for the electric grid (2) inventing new methods for waste (CO2, PFAS) conversion to valuable fuels and chemicals and (3) accelerating energy materials discovery with AI/ML. He has been named a "Talented Twelve" by Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN) and an Inventor Under 35 by MIT Technology Review (Global). His work has been recognized with the NSF CAREER Award, DOE Early Career Award, Army Research Office Early Career Award, Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (PECASE), Sloan Research Fellowship, Google Research Scholar Award, Camille-Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, ECS-Toyota Young Investigator Fellowship, CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar Award, and the 3M Nontenured Faculty Award. He obtained his PhD in chemical engineering as a NDSEG Fellow at MIT and was a TomKat Center Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford Universit
Soft Matter for Hard Sustainability Challenges
About Carlos
Carlos Diaz-Marin is an Assistant Professor in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. He leads the Diaz Energy Lab on Theory and Advanced materials (DELTA) Group, which studies and leverages soft matter for applications in energy, water, and sustainability. The group integrates fundamental studies of material-molecule/ion interactions, synthesis, characterization, modeling, and device demonstration, while guided by technoeconomic analyses, for applications such as water production from air, carbon capture, building energy efficiency, biomass utilization, critical mineral recovery, and electrochemistry.
Before coming to Stanford, Carlos was an ARPA-E ORISE Fellow at the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E) within the US Department of Energy, helping develop research funding programs in high-risk, high-reward energy and sustainability technologies. Carlos obtained his MS and PhD in Mechanical Engineering at MIT and double undergraduate degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Physics from the University of Costa Rica.
Moises Exposito-Alonso
Assistant Professor of Global Change Biology | UC Berkeley
HHMI Freeman Hrabowski Scholar
Rapid adaptation vs the Anthropocene
About Moises
Evolutionary biologist, plant ecologist and geneticist Moises (Moi) Exposito-Alonso is an Assistant Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California Berkeley and Freeman Hrabowski Scholar of the Howard Hughes Medical institute. He is also investigator in the Innovate Genomics Institute, and faculty part of the Center for Theoretical Evolutionary Genomics and the Center for Computational Biology. Moi received a BSc. in biology from the University of Seville (Spain) in 2013, working as an evolutionary ecologist in the Doñana Biological Station (CSIC), and conducted a MSc in Quantitative Genomics in 2014 at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland, UK). After earning his Ph.D. in plant genomics in 2018 at the Max Planck Institute (Germany), he started his independent group in 2019 at the Carnegie Institute for Science at Stanford University. Since 2024, he joined the faculty at University of California Berkeley and HHMI to combine experimental ecology, computational genomics, and evolution-inspired gene editing to understand whether and how plants will evolve to keep pace with climate change.
Cell-Type-Specific Reprogramming of Root Development During Water Stress and Recovery
About Trevor
Dr. Trevor Nolan is an Assistant Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at Caltech. His lab studies how plants coordinate growth and development in changing environments, with a particular focus on how roots balance growth with responses to drought and salinity. By combining single-cell and spatial genomics, live imaging, and large-scale CRISPR screening, his group aims to uncover the cellular and genetic principles of plant resilience and translate them into strategies for engineering crops that sustain growth under environmental stress. Nolan received his Ph.D. in Genetics and Genomics from Iowa State University and completed his postdoctoral training with Philip Benfey at Duke University as an NSF Plant Genome Research Program Fellow.