Stanford Energy Postdoctoral Fellowship Cohort Arrive At Stanford
A new Precourt Institute postdoc program has begun developing a global community of future leaders to realize the vision of sustainable, affordable, secure energy for all.
A new postdoctoral program at Stanford University has accepted its first cohort, the beginning of a community of interdisciplinary scholars in sustainable energy from around the world.
The recent PhD graduates come from three universities abroad and four U.S. universities. They are citizens of six different countries. Each of the Stanford Energy Postdoctoral Fellowship’s first eight fellows are co-mentored by two Stanford researchers from different disciplines. Staff scientists at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and at Carnegie Institution for Science’s two departments at Stanford can also mentor, as two are now doing, though each fellow must have at least one Stanford faculty member as a mentor.
“We’re bringing together some of the brightest minds in sustainable energy,” said Yi Cui, founding director of the fellowship, as well as director of the Precourt Institute for Energy and the Sustainability Accelerator, both within the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.
“The fellows will benefit by working with mentors who come at problems from different angles and from interacting with other fellows working on different aspects of the energy transition,” Cui said. “Stanford will benefit by our bringing new talent to campus, a cross-pollination with ideas from other universities.”
The fellows’ research projects aim to advance biofuels, sustainable steelmaking, sustainable fertilizer production, carbon dioxide utilization, models for answering economic and policy questions, and aspects of energy conversion and storage, including large-scale storage and hydrogen production. The program will support fellows for up to three years, instead of the more common two years, so fellows will have the opportunity to pursue new avenues of discovery while at Stanford.
“They will emerge from the program with an expanded scope of knowledge and a bigger toolbox,” sad Cui.
The program’s faculty advisors selected the fellows. The advisors for the first cohort were: Steven Chu (chair) in Physics and Physiology; Inês Azevedo in Energy Science & Engineering; Mark Duggan in Economics; Matthew Kanan in Chemistry; Franklin M. (Lynn) Orr in Energy Science & Engineering; Deborah Sivas at Stanford Law School; and Cui in Materials Science & Engineering, Energy Science & Engineering, and Photon Science at SLAC.
“Many great candidates applied,” said Audrey Yau, director of energy fellowships at the Precourt Institute. “This created a tough job for our advisors. Still, they’re confident that they picked the best candidates based on previous work, proposed postdoctoral research and an understanding of how their research fits into the broader energy challenge.”
Yau has created a program that includes monthly “lab crawls” for fellows to visit each other’s research spaces, monthly socials for all fellows and their mentors, and a professional development program. Fellows will also share their research progress at an annual showcase and learn how their research results can be scaled to achieve real impact. Fellows, Yau said, will be a vital part of the community at the Precourt Institute and at the program’s other sponsors: the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy, the Bits & Watts Initiative, and the StorageX Initiative.