This week's featured speaker at the UT Energy Symposium is Jessika Trancik, Professor in Energy Studies with the Institute for Data, Systems and Society at MIT. Her talk is titled "Drivers of technological improvement in clean energy."
Renewable energy installations have grown rapidly in recent decades as their costs have fallen. Will these trends continue, allowing these technologies to contribute measurably to climate change mitigation? Answering this requires understanding the determinants of technological change. This research uncovers several key drivers, from the features of technologies to the formulation of policy. In addition to fundamental insight on the drivers of technological change, several practical lessons emerge for engineers and policy-makers.
Jessika Trancik is an associate professor in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She received her B.S. in materials science and engineering from Cornell University and her Ph.D. in materials science from the University of Oxford. Before MIT, she spent several years at the Santa Fe Institute as an Omidyar Fellow, and at Columbia University as an Earth Institute Fellow. Her research focuses on evaluating the costs, environmental impacts, and scalability of low-carbon energy technologies against climate change mitigation targets.
The UT Energy Symposium meets every Thursday during the long semesters. Come early to attend a networking session before the talk: refreshments will be served at 4:45 p.m. in the POB Connector Lobby outside the auditorium.
UT Energy Symposium talks are free and open to the public; no RSVP required.