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Friday, April 14, 2023
1:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Chen 100

Resnick Young Investigators Symposium

Sarah Fletcher, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Center Fellow, Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University,
Speaker's Bio:
Sarah Fletcher is an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Center Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. Her research focuses on water resources planning and climate change adaptation. She addresses these questions using computational systems models, integrating methods from hydrology, climate science, policy analysis, and data science to inform decision-making around critical environmental challenges. Sarah holds a PhD in Engineering Systems from MIT, an S.M. in Technology and Policy from MIT, and a B.A. in Physics and Economics from the University of Pennsylvania. In her free time, she enjoys cooking, hiking, playing the violin, and reading novels. You can learn more about her work at www.fletcherlab.science
Zachary Labe, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Princeton University and NOAA GFDL,
Speaker's Bio:
Dr. Zachary Labe is a postdoc at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and the Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Program at Princeton University. His current research interests explore the intersection of climate variability, extreme events, decadal prediction, and explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). In addition to academic research, he is very passionate about improving science communication, accessibility, and outreach through engaging data-driven visualizations. After completing a B.Sc. in atmospheric sciences from Cornell University, he obtained a Ph.D. in earth system science from the University of California, Irvine in 2020. His thesis focused on synthesizing observations and climate models to identify linkages between Arctic amplification, sea-ice loss, and the midlatitude large-scale atmospheric circulation. Thereafter, he worked as a postdoc at Colorado State University on applications of XAI for detecting regional patterns of climate change and variability. He was selected as a Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow in 2019 by the National Academy of Sciences, and his science communication work is featured in dozens of local to international media outlets per year.
Dipti D. Nayak, Assistant Professor, Division of Genetics, Genomics, Evolution and Development in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley,
Speaker's Bio:
Dr. Dipti D. Nayak is an assistant professor in the Division of Genetics, Genomics, Evolution and Development in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining UC Berkeley in Fall 2019, she received her PhD from the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University in 2014 and was a Simons Foundation Fellow of the Life Sciences Research Foundation and Carl R. Woese Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from 2015-2019. She is a recipient of the Beckman Young Investigator (BYI) Award, the Searle Scholars Award, the Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering, a Rose Hills Innovator Grant, the Simons Foundation Early Career Investigator in Marine Microbial Ecology and Evolution, and is currently a Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator.
Xiao Su, Assistant Professor, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
Speaker's Bio:
Xiao Su is an Assistant Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He obtained his Bachelor in Applied Sciences in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo in 2011. He completed his PhD in Chemical Engineering from MIT in 2017, working under the supervision of Professor T. Alan Hatton from Chemical Engineering and Professor Timothy F. Jamison from Chemistry. During his doctoral studies, Xiao received the NSERC doctoral fellowship, the MIT Water Innovation Prize, and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) Catalyst Award (2017). He joined the faculty of UIUC in January 2019, and his research program pursues the molecular design of functional materials for advanced separations and process intensification. Focus areas of his group include the development of stimuli-responsive materials and electrochemically-driven separation technologies for sustainable chemical and biochemical manufacturing, as well as new pathways for waste valorization and materials recycling. Xiao is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award (2019), the ACS Victor K. LaMer Award in Colloids and Surface Science (2020), the International Society of Electrochemistry (ISE) Green Electrochemistry Prize (2021), and the Center for Advanced Study (CAS) Fellowship in 2022. Xiao is the programming chair of Area 1E: Electrochemical Fundamentals at AIChE, a member of the IE&EE Technical Planning Committee at the Electrochemical Society (ECS), and a programming committee member for the American Chemical Society (ACS) Energy & Fuels (ENFL) division.

The Resnick Young Investigators Symposium celebrates innovators in the science and technology of sustainability. The program highlights young researchers whose work shows great promise in tackling key science and engineering challenges in sustainability.

No registration required and seating is on a first come basis.

2023 Program


1:00 PM - Opening Comments

1:05 PM - Climate-Informed Adaptive Water Supply Planning

Dr. Sarah Fletcher, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Center Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University

1:55 PM - Creative Machine Learning Approaches for Climate Change Detection

Dr. Zachary Labe, Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University and NOAA GFDL

2:45 PM - 30-Minute Break (with refreshments in the Chen breezeway)

3:15 PM - CRISPR-guided insights into the biology of methanogenic archaea

Dr. Dipti D. Nayak, Assistant Professor in the Division of Genetics, Genomics, Evolution and Development in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at University of California, Berkeley

4:05 PM - Redox-mediated electrochemical strategies for precision separations: a pathway for decarbonization and circularity

Dr. Xiao Su, Assistant ProfessorĀ of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

4:55 PM - Closing Comments

For more information, please email [email protected] or visit the Resnick Young Investigators webpage.