This year’s symposium will focus on AI and energy. We will explore how AI can help accelerate the energy transition, and we will delve into solutions for addressing the AI-driven growth in energy demand. We will bring together AI and energy experts from across academia, industry, government, and non-profit organizations to engage in an active scholarly debate with the goal of maintaining an open dialogue and offering an actionable path forward. The day will start with an assessment of the tremendous opportunities for AI to enable the energy transition, while also assessing the challenges for powering this revolution. The subsequent sessions will then cover the specific opportunities in more detail.
This event is open to MIT Energy Initiative Members and invited guests.
Preliminary Agenda
| Tuesday, May 13 | |
| 8:00-9:00 am | Breakfast and registration |
| 9:00-9:10 am |
Welcome and opening remarks
William H. Green, Director, MIT Energy Initiative; Hoyt C. Hottel Professor, MIT Department of Chemical Engineering |
| 9:10-10:00 am |
Peril and promise of AI
Judy Chang, Commissioner, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Moderated by: John Parsons, Deputy Director for Research, MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research |
| 10:00-11:00 am |
Harnessing AI to accelerate deployment of energy transition infrastructure
Joseph Capone, VP of Technology, GridUnity Moderated by: Deepjyoti Deka, Research Scientist, MIT Energy Initiative |
| 11:00-11:30 am | Break |
| 11:30 am-12:30 pm |
Strategies to meet clean energy goals from data centers
Kathryn Biegel, Manager, RD&D Partnerships, Constellation Energy Moderated by: Ruaridh Macdonald, Research Scientist, MIT Energy Initiative |
| 12:30-1:45 pm | Lunch |
| 1:45-2:15 pm |
Presentation by Evelyn N. Wang, MIT Vice President for Energy and Climate, Ford Professor of Engineering, MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering Moderated by: William H. Green, Director, MIT Energy Initiative; Hoyt C. Hottel Professor, MIT Department of Chemical Engineering |
| 2:15-3:15 pm |
Opportunities to reduce data center energy demand
Dustin Demetriou, Senior Technical Staff Member, Sustainability and Data Center Innovation, IBM |
| 3:15-3:30 pm | Break |
| 3:30-4:15 pm |
Harnessing AI to discover and exploit advanced materials needed for the energy transition
Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli, Paul M. Cook Career Development Associate Professor, MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering Moderated by Randall Field, Director of Research, MIT Energy Initiative |
| 4:15-4:45 pm |
Sustainable energy solutions for data centers requires collaboration
Antonia Gawel, Global Director of Sustainability & Partnerships, Google |
| 4:45-5:15 pm |
Summary and next steps Randall Field, Director of Research, MIT Energy Initiative |
| 5:15-7:00 pm | Reception and poster session
|
About the speakers
Kathryn Biegel
Manager, RD& Partnerships, Constellation Energy
Kathryn Biegel is a manager in the Corporate Strategy group at Constellation, bridging the company’s strategic technology outlook and R&D portfolio within the nuclear field. Prior to joining Constellation, Biegel was a graduate research fellow in the Nuclear Science and Engineering Division at Argonne National Laboratory, studying economic challenges and opportunities for new and existing nuclear power in deregulated energy markets. Prior experience includes energy consulting with PowerAdvocate (now part of Wood Mackenzie) including rate case analysis and capital investment program planning. She received her BS in nuclear science and engineering from MIT in 2015, and is currently completing a PhD in nuclear engineering at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
Joseph Capone
VP of Technology, GridUnity
Judy Chang
Commissioner, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission
Commissioner Chang is an energy economics and policy expert with more than 20 years of experience working with energy companies, trade associations and governments on regulatory and financial issues, particularly as they relate to investment decisions in electric transmission, clean energy, and energy storage.
She is the former Undersecretary of Energy and Climate Solutions for Massachusetts, a role in which she led efforts to set policies across the Commonwealth’s energy sector and align strategies and plans to meet legal requirements for climate change mitigation. Commissioner Chang has presented and testified before U.S. federal and state agencies and regulatory authorities in Canada on topics related to energy resource deployment; energy contracts; transmission planning, access and pricing; and electricity market design. She has presented her work at industry conferences and academic seminars on energy and environmental policies.
Commissioner Chang has taught as an adjunct lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and served as a senior fellow at the Kennedy School’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government. She also served as an ambassador for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Clean Energy Education & Empowerment Initiative and was a founding board member of New England Women in Energy and the Environment.
Commissioner Chang holds a Master of Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School and a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Davis.
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.
Dustin Demetriou
Senior Technical Staff Member, Sustainability and Data Center Innovation, IBM
Dustin Demetriou is a senior technical staff member at IBM. He has spent the last 15 years helping to deliver some of the world’s most energy efficient mission critical facilities and information technology equipment. Demetriou is a globally recognized expert in the field of thermal management and data center energy efficiency. He received a PhD in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Syracuse University and is an Accredited Sustainability Advisor by the Uptime Institute and an ASHRAE Distinguished Lecturer. In his current role, Demetriou leads sustainability and data center innovation for IBM Infrastructure. Demetriou is the current chair of the ASHRAE Technical Committee 9.9 (TC 9.9) IT Subcommittee and the past chair of ASHRAE TC 9.9. He also serves as secretary for the Liquid Subcommittee of ASHRAE SSPC 127. Demetriou is the editor of the ASHRAE TC 9.9 Datacom Encyclopedia, a comprehensive online encyclopedia with essential knowledge about important datacom topics including facility design considerations, ITE design considerations, environmental guidelines, cooling technologies, and energy efficiency. Demetriou has co-authored four books in the ASHRAE Datacom Series, authored or coauthored over thirty journal and peer-reviewed conference publications, and has been granted forty-three United States patents. He also serves on the Executive Committee for the IEEE ITherm.
Priya Donti
Silverman (1968) Family Career Development Professor and Assistant Professor, MIT Electrical Engineering & Computer Science Departmentand MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems
Priya Donti is an assistant professor and the Silverman (1968) Family Career Development Professor at MIT EECS and LIDS. Her research focuses on machine learning for forecasting, optimization, and control in high-renewables power grids. Methodologically, this entails exploring ways to incorporate relevant physics, hard constraints, and decision-making procedures into deep learning workflows. Donti is also the co-founder and chair of Climate Change AI, a global nonprofit initiative to catalyze impactful work at the intersection of climate change and machine learning. Donti received her PhD in computer science and public policy from Carnegie Mellon University. She was recognized as part of the MIT Technology Review’s 2021 list of “35 Innovators Under 35” and Vox’s 2023 “Future Perfect 50,” and is a recipient of the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Early Career Fellowship, the ACM SIGEnergy Doctoral Dissertation Award, the Siebel Scholarship, the U.S. Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, and best paper awards at ICML (honorable mention), ACM e-Energy (runner-up), PECI, the Duke Energy Data Analytics Symposium, and the NeurIPS workshop on AI for Social Good.
Randall Field
Director of Research, MIT Energy Initiative
Randall Field is the director of research at the MIT Energy Initiative. He is also executive director of MIT’s Fusion Study examining the global multidecadal dynamics of the energy transition and how fusion energy can contribute to decarbonizing global energy systems. He was previously executive director for MITEI’s Mobility Systems Center, assessing the impact of transformations in vehicle and fuel technologies, service and business models, and consumer behavior in the movement of both passengers and goods. 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.
Vijay Gadepally
Senior Scientist, MIT Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center
Vijay Gadepally is a senior scientist and PI at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory, a visiting scientist with MIT Connection Science, and works closely with the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). At Lincoln Laboratory, Gadepally leads the research efforts of the Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center. Gadepally’s research interests include high performance computing, artificial intelligence, high performance databases, and environmentally-friendly computing. Gadepally is also the chief technology officer of Radium Cloud–a company focused on providing high performance cloud computing for AI workloads–and advises multiple early-stage venture-backed startups. Gadepally holds a MSc and PhD in electrical and computer engineering from The Ohio State University and a BTech degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. Gadepally’s research in high performance computing, artificial intelligence, and environmentally-friendly computing has been featured in numerous articles in the popular press and has received numerous scholarly awards at various conferences. Gadepally also serves on several advisory committees including those convened by the National Academies, World Economic Forum, and Open Compute Project, amongst others. In 2017, Gadepally was named to AFCEA’s inaugural 40 under 40 list and was awarded MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Early Career Technical Achievement Award. In 2011, Gadepally received an Outstanding Graduate Student Award at The Ohio State University.
Antonia Gawel
Global Director of Sustainability & Partnerships, Google
Antonia Gawel is global director of sustainability & partnerships, where she works with teams across Google and with external partners to progress company-wide sustainability & climate goals with a focus on Climate & AI, Net Zero and scaling sustainability product solutions. Building partnerships is at the core of her work, recognizing that Google can only successfully achieve its goals in collaboration with governments, NGOs, think tanks, and experts to jointly unlock the system-wide transformations required.
In her 20 years of experience driving system change, she has worked globally with a range of leading international institutions including as head of climate change and deputy director of the WEF Centre for Nature and Climate, senior analyst with the International Energy Agency and deputy director of energy and climate at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. She also spent two years working in Bhutan and across the region as an adviser on environment and clean energy.
She holds a Master’s in environmental planning, policy and regulation from the London School of Economics and a BA in environmental economics from the University of Toronto. In 2005, she was nominated by the International Institute for Sustainable Development as a Young Global Leader for Sustainable Development.
Emre Gençer
Co-founder and CEO, Sesame Sustainability
Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli
Paul M. Cook Career Development Associate Professor, MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Rafael Gomez-Bombarelli is the Paul M Cook Associate Professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees in chemistry from the University of Salamanca, Spain, and conducted postdoctoral research at Heriot-Watt University and Harvard University. His research integrates machine learning with atomistic simulations to expedite the discovery and design of novel materials for applications in energy, sustainability, and healthcare.
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.
Detlef Hohl
Chief Scientist Computational and Data Science, Shell
Detlef Hohl spent his entire Shell career in R&D, both in the U.S. and in Europe first in geophysical seismic imaging, then in probabilistic seismic inversion, and then he became R&D team leader for “Quantitative Reservoir Management”. From 2010-2017, he was R&D general manager computation and modeling where he led a project portfolio in data analytics, computational engineering and materials science, geoscience, and petroleum engineering.
Hohl was appointed Shell’s chief scientist for computational and data science in 2017 where he oversees and guides Shell’s entire computational and computer science portfolio, including elements of artificial intelligence, physical systems simulation at all spatial and temporal scales, chemicals and chemical engineering modeling, future energy systems optimization, atmospheric and Earth science modeling.
Hohl has always used the largest available high-performance computers of their time to do big things that cannot be done otherwise. He is active in the academic, national laboratory, and joint industry research communities, member of APS, ACM, SIAM, SPE, SEG and AGU. Hohl is adjunct professor and teaches courses at Rice University (Computational and Applied Math). He held various temporary and visiting positions at NCSA, SISSA Trieste, NIST, and Stanford University. In his free time, science remains his biggest hobby.
Mingda Li
Associate Professor, MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering
Mingda Li is a researcher in AI-driven materials science, with a focus on quantum materials and materials characterization. His work on integrating AI with spectroscopy was recognized with a DOE Early Career Award and has contributed to several publications in leading physical science journals. Some of the AI frameworks developed by his group have been adopted by DOE National Labs to support experimental tools. His group’s work on virtual graph networks was featured on the cover of Nature Computational Science. He has also contributed to discussions at the DOE AI for Materials Roundtable, helping to inform future directions in AI-enabled energy materials research.
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 also ensuring grid resilience and security. He is developing novel approaches to macro-energy system modelling 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. Ruaridh is a co-lead developer of the GenX and DOLPHYN macro-energy system models. He completed his PhD in Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT.
Elsa A. Olivetti
Mission Director, MIT Climate Project; Strategic Advisor, MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium; Jerry McAfee (1940) Professor in Engineering, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, MacVicar Faculty Fellow, MIT MIT
Elsa Olivetti received a BS in engineering science from the University of Virginia in 2000, and a PhD in materials science and engineering from MIT in 2007. She spent her PhD program studying the electrochemistry of polymer and inorganic materials for electrodes in lithium-ion batteries. In 2014, she became faculty in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering. She directs the MIT Climate Project’s Decarbonizing Energy and Industry Mission and is the strategic advisor for the MIT Climate & Sustainability Consortium.
Olivetti’s research focuses on improving the environmental and economic sustainability of materials. Specifically, she develops analytical and computational models to provide early-stage information on the cost and environmental impact of materials. Olivetti and her research group colleagues work toward improving sustainability through increased use of recycled and renewable materials, recycling-friendly material design, and intelligent waste disposition. The group also focuses on understanding the implications of substitution, dematerialization, and waste mining on materials markets.
John Parsons
Deputy Director for Research, MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research
John Parsons is the deputy director for research of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR). His research focuses on the valuation and financing of investments in energy markets, as well as the problems of risk in energy and environment markets. Recent publications have touched on interregional transmission investments, including the interaction with hydro assets and expanded penetration of renewables, the value of investments in life extensions of nuclear power plants, the economics of new microreactors, and the impact of decarbonization on generation assets in the U.S. midcontinent.
Parsons has served as an associate member of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Energy and Environmental Markets Advisory Committee and has been a visiting scholar at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Parsons served as the executive director at both CEEPR and the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, and also as head of Sloan’s MBA Finance Track. Before returning to MIT, Parsons spent ten years as a business consultant at Charles River Associates. He holds a PhD in economics from Northwestern University and an AB from Princeton University.
Rajeev J. Ram
Professor, MIT Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science; Partner, Breakthrough Energy Ventures
Rajeev J. Ram has been on the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science faculty at MIT since 1997. He served as a program director at the newly founded Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy. At ARPA-E, he developed the ADEPT program, which accelerated the deployment of wide-bandgap semiconductors and the GENI program which worked to increase the grid’s flexibility and resilience. Ram has served on the Breakthrough Energy Ventures scientific advisory board since 2018. Since 2023, he has been a senior partner at BEV.
He was educated as an applied physicist at Caltech and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He developed record brightness LED’s while at HP Labs, Palo Alto (LumiLEDs) and, at MIT, developed CMOS photonics, microscale bioreactors, swept source Raman analyzers, photonic architectures for trapped-ion quantum computers and atomic clocks, internal cooling of semiconductor devices, and optical biomarkers for early detection of plant stress. He is an IEEE Fellow and Optica Fellow and an MIT Bose Fellow and MacVicar Fellow and Hertz Fellow.
He co-founded erbi Biosystems (acquired by Merck KGaA in 2022), which develops microbioreactors for automated microbial and mammalian cell culture. He also co-founded Ayar Labs that provides co-packaged photonic I/O for high-performance computing.
Uday Varadarajan
Senior Principal, RMI
Uday Varadarajan is a senior principal at RMI where he applies cutting edge data and analytics to develop new approaches to achieve an affordable and fair transition to zero-carbon energy system. His team’s work helped shape key Inflation Reduction Act programs–including the $250 billion Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment loan program, the $10 billion USDA NewERA program for rural co-ops, and changes to federal clean energy tax incentives–that together ensure the benefits of the transition to clean energy are broadly shared. These policies were informed by his team’s work at RMI–and previously as a Stanford SFI Fellow and at Climate Policy Initiative (CPI)–pioneering the use of ratepayer-backed bond securitization to help make fossil transition more affordable and just. That work resulted in over $1.5 billion in five new fossil transition transactions in the U.S., passage of enabling legislation in seven additional states, and proposed international fossil transition mechanisms to scale the approach beyond. Prior to his time at CPI, he was a program examiner in the U.S. White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), where oversaw the cost assessment and approval of the first $8 billion in DOE loans to automakers, including loans to Tesla and Nissan to build electric vehicles. Varadarajan was an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow, a postdoctoral fellow in theoretical physics at the University of Texas at Austin, and completed a PhD in physics from the University of California at Berkeley and an undergraduate degree in physics from Princeton University.
Evelyn N. Wang
MIT Vice President for Energy and Climate, MIT; Ford Professor of Engineering MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering
Evelyn N. Wang is the inaugural vice president for energy and climate and the Ford Professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She previously served as the director at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) from 2023 to 2025, where she led the agency’s development, launch, and execution of high-risk, high-reward energy research and development programs. At MIT, she developed technologies for thermal management, energy conversion and storage, and water harvesting and purification. She holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from Stanford University. She also received an MS in mechanical engineering from Stanford University and a BS in mechanical engineering from MIT. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.