Energizing@MIT: MITEI’s Annual Research Conference frames the key technology, policy, and economic drivers that are shaping today’s energy system and its future. This year’s theme is Tackling emerging energy challenges. We will explore grid resiliency, energy storage, vehicle electrification, carbon capture, low-carbon fuels, and geopolitics, and we will hear from MITEI-funded startups on their path from lab to market. We will also review promising discoveries from MITEI’s Seed Fund program, which supports innovative early-stage research, as well as hear from MIT UROP students, Energy Scholars, and Future Energy Systems Center project teams.
PRELIMINARY AGENDA
| Tuesday, September 9 | |
| 8:00-9:00 am | Breakfast and registration |
| 9:00-9:15 am |
Welcome and opening remarks
William H. Green, Director, MIT Energy Initiative; Hoyt C. Hottel Professor, |
| 9:15-10:00 am | Keynote address |
| 10:00-11:15 am |
Grid resiliency Deepjyoti Deka, Research Scientist, MIT Energy Initiative |
| 11:15-11:30 am | Break |
| 11:30 am-12:45 pm | Carbon capture in power generation |
| 12:45-2:00 pm | Lunch |
| 2:00-3:15 pm | MITEI General Seed Fund Project annual check-up
Moderated by: Martha Broad, Executive Director, MIT Energy Initiative |
| 3:15-3:30 pm | Break |
| 3:30-4:45 pm |
Long duration energy storage Manlio Coviello, President, Energy Dome Latam |
| 4:45-5:00 pm | Day 1 closing remarks |
| 5:00-7:00 pm | Reception with MIT UROP student poster presentations |
| Wednesday, September 10 | |
| 8:00-9:00 am | Breakfast and registration |
| 9:00-10:15 am |
Vehicle electrification
Morgan Andreae, Executive Director, Future Energy Systems Center, |
| 10:15-10:30 am | Break |
| 10:30-11:45 am |
Propelling the future: Low-carbon fuels Introduction by: Randall Field, Director of Research, MIT Energy Initiative Erik G. Birkerts, Chief Growth Officer, LanzaJet Moderated by: Desiree Plata, Professor, MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering |
| 11:45 am-1:15 pm | Lunch with Energy Scholars poster presentations |
| 1:15-2:30 pm | Geopolitics of the energy transition |
| 2:30-3:00 pm | Keynote address |
| 3:00-3:15 pm | Break |
| 3:15-4:30 pm |
From lab to market: Paths to commercialization Iwnetim Abate, Assistant Professor, MIT Department of Materials Science |
| 4:30-4:45 pm | Summary |
| 4:45-6:30 pm | Reception with Future Energy Systems Center project highlights |
About the speakers
Iwnetim Abate
Assistant Professor, MIT Department of Materials Science & Engineering
Morgan Andreae
Executive Director, Future Energy Systems Center, MIT Energy Initiative
Morgan Andreae is the executive director of MITEI’s Future Energy Systems Center. Prior to joining MITEI, Andreae was the executive director of technology and innovation at Cummins where he led teams in the development of new battery, fuel cell, electrolyzer, and electric traction technologies. Over the course of his career Andreae has held a variety of roles in technology development, strategy, and product development, with a consistent focus on bringing more sustainable technology to market. Andreae holds over 25 patents on diesel, hybrid-electric, and electric powertrain technology. He has a PhD in mechanical engineering from MIT, a Masters and Bachelors in engineering from Dartmouth College, and a Bachelors in history from Haverford College.
Erik G. Birkerts
Chief Growth Officer, LanzaJet
Martha Broad
Executive Director, MIT Energy Initiative
Martha Broad is MITEI’s executive director. As part of the leadership team, she works to link science, innovation and policy to transform the world’s energy systems. She has a track record of successfully partnering with business, government and nonprofit stakeholders to support the clean energy transition. At MITEI, she works closely with member companies who collaborate with MIT researchers on a spectrum of topics, including the Future Energy Systems Center.
In addition, she spearheads MITEI’s collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy to design, manage, and host the annual Clean Energy Education and Empowerment (C3E) Women in Clean Energy Symposium and serves as a C3E Ambassador.
Previously, as part of the senior management team of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC), Broad led programs and studies that focused on the commercialization of clean energy technologies. By collaborating with universities and public and private partners, she helped facilitate the state’s successful installation of hundreds of megawatts of wind and solar systems.
Samantha Coday
Assistant Professor, MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Samantha Coday is an assistant professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a principal investigator in the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics. She received the MS degree and PhD degree in electrical engineering and computer sciences in 2019 and 2023, respectively, from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include ultra-dense power converters enabling renewable energy integration, hybrid electric aircraft, and future space exploration. She focuses on the optimization, design, and control of hybrid switched-capacitor converters. Coday is recipient of several APEC best presentation awards and the NSF CAREER award.
Manlio Coviello
President, Energy Dome Latam
Manlio Coviello received a doctorate (cum Laude) in geophysics (Genoa University) and a master in business administration (Bocconi University, Milan). Currently, he is an assistant professor in energy planning at Catholic University of Chile; an associate professor in energy transition and co-coordinator of the international master on climate change at the Polytechnic University of Turin.
Currently, Coviello is chairman of Energy Dome Latam and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of TERNA spa. He has been chairman of the Board of TERNA PLUS and Presidente & CEO of Terna Uruguay, Terna Brasil, Terna Chile, and Terna. Previously, he was chief of the Energy & Mining Department, Economic Commission for Latin America, United Nations.
Coviello is member of the following Advisory Boards: Energy Center, Polytechnic University Turin, PoliTO – Italy; Harvard Electricity Policy Group, Harvard Kennedy School Government, USA; and American Business Dialogue Energy & Natural Resources Group, IADB, USA. In 2012, Coviello acted as senior fellow professor at the IASS (Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies) in Potsdam, Germany, working with Nobel Prize in Physics Professor Carlo Rubbia, on advanced materials & technologies for renewable energies and energy storage. In April 2024, he acted as senior consultant for the Bureau of Intelligence, U.S. Department of State, on nearshoring industry for critical minerals.
Deepjyoti Deka
Research Scientist, MIT Energy Initiative
Deep Deka is a research scientist at MIT Energy Initiative. His research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and optimization for tractable sensing and secure operation in renewable rich power grids. From 2018-2024, he was a staff scientist in the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory and served as a PI/co-PI for DOE and internal projects on machine learning in power systems and optimization of interdependent networks. He received the MS and PhD degrees in electrical and computer engineering (ECE) from the University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA, in 2011 and 2015, respectively. He completed his undergraduate degree in electronics and communication engineering (ECE) from IIT Guwahati, India with an institute silver medal as the best outgoing student of the department in 2009. Deka is a senior member of IEEE and has served as an editor on IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid.
Tali Dotan
Postdoctoral Associate, Furst Lab, MIT Department of Chemical Engineering
Pablo Duenas-Martinez
Research Scientist, MIT Energy Initiative
Pablo Duenas-Martinez is a research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative, research assistant professor at Universidad Pontificia Comillas, and a gas-electricity advisor for the Florence School of Regulation at the European University Institute. His research area embeds the economic and regulatory modeling and analysis, and the role of traditional and new generation technologies in shaping the energy systems of the future, in low- to high-income countries, within a carbon-constrained world. He has published on topics such as liberalization and regulation of gas and electricity markets, energy security of supply and resiliency in decarbonizing economies, impact of distributed energy resources, analysis and regulation for universal energy access, and mathematical modeling of energy systems. During his career, he has worked with energy companies, as well as government and regulatory agencies, on research projects and to provide advice aimed at improving operations and investments in energy systems worldwide. He has participated in research projects funded by major U.S. governmental agencies (NSF and ARPA-E), and in more than 30 research contracts, acting in three of them as principal investigator. He has more than 50 publications as JCR peer-reviewed papers, conference and non-JCR papers, technical reports and studies, and book chapters. He has presented in international conferences, and been invited as an expert to workshops organized by, among others, the Inter-American Development Bank and the International Energy Agency. He obtained his BS in industrial engineering, MS in electric power systems, and PhD in electrical engineering at the Universidad Pontificia Comillas in Madrid, Spain; and received a BS in economics from the National Distance Education University in Madrid, Spain.
Randall Field
Director of Research, MIT Energy Initiative
As the director of research, Randall Field supervises the research performed by MITEI research scientists and their teams. He was also executive director of MIT’s fusion study, which released the 2024 report The role of fusion energy in a decarbonized electricity system, examining the global multidecadal dynamics of the energy transition and how fusion energy can contribute. He was previously executive director for MITEI’s Future Energy Systems Center and Mobility Systems Center. He was also executive director for MIT’s Mobility of the Future study, which produced the Insights in the Future Mobility report covering global projections of alternative fuel vehicle fleets and energy consumption, deployment of charging and fueling infrastructure, attitudes towards mobility, and the impacts of innovative technologies and business models on urban mobility. As executive director for the Conversion Research Program at MIT for 10 years, Field worked with a multidisciplinary team of researchers to explore various conversion technologies for production of alternative fuels. Prior to MIT, Field worked for Aspen Technology for 23 years. Field received a SM in chemical engineering practice from MIT and a BS in chemical engineering from Caltech.
William H. Green
Director, MIT Energy Initiative; Hoyt C. Hottel Professor, MIT Department of Chemical Engineering
William H. Green, the Hoyt C. Hottel Professor at MIT, is a world leader in chemical kinetics, reaction engineering, prediction of chemical reactions and properties, and in development of related software. He has led many combined experimental/modeling research projects related to fuels, combustion, pyrolysis, and oxidative stability, and he invented an instrument to directly measure rate coefficients for multi-channel reactions. He developed computer methods to predict the behavior of complicated reacting mixtures, many of which are included in the open source Reaction Mechanism Generator software package, a type of AI expert system for reactive chemistry. The associated popular website rmg.mit.edu includes estimators for many chemical properties and several databases. Green co-invented several algorithms and numerical methods helpful for handling complicated chemical kinetics. His group has also developed machine-learning methods and software (ASKCOS and Chemprop) for accurately predicting the products of organic reactions and for predicting many chemical and reaction properties. Chemprop, whose recent versions were developed primarily by Green’s research group, is currently the most popular open-source chemistry software on GitHub. It is heavily used by the pharmaceutical industry, to predict the properties of proposed new drug molecules. Green also invents and analyzes technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, particularly in the transportation/fuel sector. Two of his greenhouse-gas reduction inventions are now being commercialized, one by Thiozen, a company he co-founded. Recently he has been developing and analyzing technology options for decarbonizing the freight sector, with a special interest in long-haul trucking.
Green earned his BA from Swarthmore College, and his PhD in physical chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley under the supervision of C. Bradley Moore. After postdocs at Cambridge University with Nicholas Handy and at the University of Pennsylvania with Marsha Lester, he worked for Exxon Research & Engineering for six years before joining the Chemical Engineering faculty at MIT in 1997. Green has co-authored more than 350 journal articles, which have been cited more than 23,000 times. He is a fellow of the AAAS and of the Combustion Institute, and has received the American Chemical Society’s Glenn Award in Energy & Fuel Chemistry and the AIChE’s Wilhelm Award in Reaction Engineering. He convened and organized the International Conference on Chemical Kinetics in 2011, and now serves as treasurer of that conference series. More than 20 of his former graduate or postdoctoral students are now tenured or tenure-track faculty. He previously served as the editor of the International Journal of Chemical Kinetics, as the faculty chair of MIT’s Mobility of the Future project, and as the executive officer of the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering. He was appointed director of the MIT Energy Initiative in Spring 2024.
Aristide Gumyusenge
Merton C. Flemings Assistant Professor of Materials Science & Engineering, MIT Department of Materials Science & Engineering
Asegun Henry
Professor, MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering
Andrew Inglis
Geothermal Venture Builder, MIT Proto Ventures
Andrew Inglis is an accomplished applied physicist with over 15 years of experience in transforming electro-physics technologies from concept to market-leading products. As the founder of Silverside Detectors, he developed and commercialized low-cost neutron radiation detectors, specifically designed for large scale deployments for nuclear non-proliferation and agricultural water management.
He has recently joint Proto Ventures, MIT’s Venture Studio, to focus on deploying innovations that will help geothermal become one of the world’s main sources of baseload clean electrical and heat energy.
He earned his PhD in physics from Boston University and MS in engineering science from the University of Virginia.
Ruaridh Macdonald
Research Scientist, MIT Energy Initiative
Ruaridh Macdonald is the energy systems research lead at the MIT Energy Initiative. His research explores how best to decarbonize the electricity grid and other sectors, and which technologies and policies will reduce the cost of the energy transition while ensuring grid resilience and security. He is developing novel approaches to modelling infrastructure planning which allow for larger multi-sector energy systems to be optimized over long time periods. This allows for technologies to be modelled with greater fidelity and considering interannual variation in energy supply and demand. Macdonald is a co-lead developer of the GenX, DOLPHYN, and Macro infrastructure planning models. He completed his PhD in nuclear science and engineering at MIT.
Desiree Plata
Professor, MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Veronica Robertson
Portfolio Manager, ExxonMobil
Brent Ridley
Senior Advisor, Impact and Translation, MIT Climate Project
Yogesh Surendranath
Associate Professor, MIT Department of Chemistry
Trent Weiss
PhD Candidate, MIT Department of Chemical Engineering
Trent Weiss is a PhD candidate in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT, advised by Professor Fikile Brushett. His research centers on electrochemical energy storage, with an emphasis on rethinking lithium-ion battery electrode and cell architectures to meet the demands of high-power, high-energy applications such as electric aviation and heavy-duty electrified transportation. His thesis work focuses on the fabrication of electrode architectures designed to enable the scalable production of mechanically robust, thick electrodes—paving the way for batteries with enhanced performance.
Weiss earned his MS in chemical engineering practice (MSCEP) from MIT in 2023 and his BS in chemical and biomolecular engineering with a minor in economics from Georgia Tech in 2019. Prior to graduate school, he worked at ExxonMobil in the Supply Chain Optimization group, where he developed mathematical models to improve the efficiency of integrated logistics systems across the company’s operations.