MARK BARTEAU

Mark Barteau is the University of Delaware’s Senior Vice Provost for Research and Strategic Initiatives, the Robert L. Pigford Chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering, and professor of chemistry and biochemistry. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and recently was named to the American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ list of “100 Chemical Engineers of the Modern Era.” Barteau has received numerous awards, including UD’s top faculty honor &emdash the Francis Alison Award, the Ipatieff Prize from the American Chemical Society, and the Paul Emmett Award from the Catalysis Society. He has published more than 200 journal articles, is a co-inventor on two patents, and has given dozens of invited lectures at universities and organizations throughout the world. He holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University.

 

DAVID BROND

David Brond is Vice President of Communications & Marketing at the University of Delaware. He leads the University's public information, brand awareness, and institutional marketing initiatives, managing public and media relations; research, graduate, and global communications; advertising and licensing; publications; Web design and photographic services; and the University’s mascot program. Prior to his appointment at UD in April 2008, Brond served as vice president of marketing and planning at the University of Maryland Medical System. He holds a B.A. in economics and geography from Bucknell University and an M.B.A. and M.H.A. from Duke University. He is an active member of the Fuel Fund of Maryland Board of Directors and past vice-chair of the American Red Cross, Chesapeake LifeBoard.

 

JOHN SWEENEY

John Sweeney is the The News Journal’s Editorial Page Editor. He also has served as the newspaper's public editor and local news editor. The ancestry of The News Journal dates back to Oct. 1, 1866. In 1996, the newspaper became one of over 30 print sites for USA Today, the nation’s newspaper. With a daily circulation of more than 102,000, The News Journal is among the top 100 newspapers in daily readership in the United States. Sweeney is the founding director of the Wilmington Writer’s Institute and the co-author, with UD English Professor Dennis Jackson, of The Journalist’s Craft: A Guide to Writing Better Stories (Allworth Press, 2002), a collection of 19 essays from veteran news writers, including several Pulitzer Prize winners, that explains how to weave storytelling skills into nonfiction narratives.

 

ROBERT BIRKMIRE

Robert Birkmire is a professor of materials science and engineering and director of the University of Delaware's Institute of Energy Conversion, a U.S. Department of Energy Center of Excellence for Photovoltaic Research and Education. He has been principal investigator on numerous government programs sponsored by DOE, DARPA, NASA, DOD, and NIST for research on amorphous and polycrystalline thin-film solar cells and crystalline silicon solar cells. This research also has been supported by BP Solar, DuPont, GE Energy, Global Solar, Konarka, Ascent Solar, SoloPower, and Telio Solar. Current research focuses on growth and characterization of thin-film semiconductors for photovoltaic and opto-electronic devices and the relationship of the growth process to film properties and device performance. He also is developing mechanisms for transferring lab results to commercial processes using advanced sensor technologies. He is the author of over 150 technical publications, the inventor on eight U.S. patents, and the executive director of the Council for Photovoltaic Research, an organization of university faculty to promote and support photovoltaic research.

 

JOHN BYRNE

John Byrne is Distinguished Professor of Energy and Climate Policy and director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy (CEEP) at the University of Delaware. He is a member of the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. He is co-founder and co-executive director of the Joint Institute for a Sustainable Energy and Environmental Future, an innovative research and policy advocacy organization headquartered in South Korea with the mission of promoting sustainable policy options in East Asia. He is also a founding member of the International Solar Cities Initiative, a pioneering program to assist cities around the globe in building sustainable futures. He co-chairs the Sustainable Energy Utility Oversight Board, created by the Delaware General Assembly, and is the architect of this innovative concept for promoting energy efficiency, conservation, and distributed renewable energy generation. He created the first graduate degrees in the United States in the combined area of energy and environmental policy and has authored 17 books and over 150 research articles.

 

JINGGUANG CHEN

Jingguang Chen is the Claire D. LeClaire Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Delaware. He served as the director of UD's Center for Catalytic Science and Technology (CCST) from 2000 &endash 2007 and currently is the interim director of the UD Energy Institute and co-director of UD's Energy Frontier Research Center. He received his B.S. degree from Nanjing University and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to joining the UD faculty in 1998, he worked in industry at Exxon Corporate Research Laboratories. He has over 170 journal publications and 17 U.S. patents and is very active in the surface science and catalysis communities, serving as the chair for the Gordon Research Conference on Catalysis in 2002, the chair of the Philadelphia Catalysis Club in 2004, on the board of directors for the North American Catalysis Society, and the Catalysis Secretariat of the American Chemical Society. He has won many awards, including the recent Excellence in Catalysis Award from the New York Catalysis Society. Chen's research group is working on the design of carbide and bimetallic catalysts for energy applications.

 

WILLETT KEMPTON

Willett Kempton is a professor in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment at the University of Delaware and director of UD's Center for Carbon-free Power Integration. His primary research and teaching emphases include offshore wind power and the use of electric vehicles to provide power to the electric grid, called vehicle-to-grid (V2G). The V2G technology patented by Kempton and his colleagues has been licensed by a Delaware company and is now in a proof-of-concept demonstration. He developed the world's first graduate program on offshore wind at UD and currently chairs the Offshore Wind Working Group of the American Wind Energy Association. His research also has covered American citizens' understanding of global climate change, public attitudes toward wind power, energy efficiency policies, and factors that move citizens to take environmental action. He has written/edited several books and coauthored Environmental Values in American Culture (1995, MIT Press), a study of Americans' environmental beliefs. Prior to joining UD in 1992, he held research or teaching positions at Princeton, Michigan State University, and the University of California Berkeley and Irvine campuses.

 

MICHAEL KLEIN

Michael T. Klein is the Board of Governors Professor of Chemical Engineering at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Previously, he was the dean of engineering at Rutgers and the Elizabeth Inez Kelley Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Delaware, where he also served as department chair, director of the Center for Catalytic Science and Technology, and associate dean. He received a bachelor's degree from the University of Delaware in 1977 and a Sc.D. from MIT in 1981, both in chemical engineering. The author of over 200 technical papers, he is active in research in the area of chemical reaction engineering, with special emphasis on the kinetics of complex systems. He is the editor-in-chief of the Americal Chemical Society journal Energy and Fuels and the reaction engineering topical editor for the Encyclopedia of Catalysis. He serves on the editorial board for Reviews in Process Chemistry and Engineering and the McGraw-Hill Chemical Engineering series. He has received the R. H. Wilhelm Award in Chemical Reaction Engineering from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the National Science Foundation's Presidential Young Investigator Award, and the American Chemical Society's Delaware Valley Section Award.

 

AJAY PRASAD

Ajay K. Prasad earned his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University and has been on the mechanical engineering faculty at the University of Delaware since 1992. His research is focused on clean energy technologies including fuel cells, wind and ocean current energy, and vehicle-to-grid technology. He founded the UD Center for Fuel Cell Research in 2008 to bring together faculty and industry engaged in fuel cell and hydrogen infrastructure research. As director of the UD Fuel Cell Bus Program, he leads a consortium that conducts research, development, and demonstration of fuel cell buses and hydrogen filling stations in Delaware. He serves on the University's Sustainability Task Force, the Steering Committee for the UD Energy Institute, and the City of Newark’s Conservation Advisory Commission.